Colomiers has undoubtedly lived its best season in Pro D2. But after 23 days, it stopped, unfinished. Aurélien Beco, the captain, and his teammates will never know the outcome of this beautiful epic.
Since Tuesday, the columbian rugby players have found the Michel-Bendichou stadium. By small groups of players to pass the medical tests, those of the Covid (serological and nasal swabs). And that’s it for the week. They will meet again from next Monday for physical exercises, always in small groups. A strange period, far from the euphoria that reigned there two months ago, when Colomiers was leading the championship, with 11 wins in the last 12 days, launched towards more than promising final stages. Aurélien Beco, captain of Colomiers, talks about this new and frustrating situation.
Aurélien, how have you lived these last two months?
I admit that there were complicated moments. We found ourselves faced with an unprecedented situation with a huge range of rest, without really knowing what turn it was going to take. Rest is good, but when you don’t have a recovery goal in mind, it becomes more complicated to live with. There, we left on a very framed preparation with a resumption objective on September 5 or 12. Knowing that we are still at the mercy of the evolution of the health crisis.
Let’s go back to the last unfinished exercise. You must be frustrated.
Yes, that’s for sure if you only show navel-gazing. But you have to know how to gain height. We have just experienced an unprecedented crisis, there have been many deaths, people who have suffered so rugby is just sport. But it is true that the season was looking very good, with an enticing end but we will not be able to live it. Too bad for this group that drooled last season and for some players who stop their careers without experiencing a last match.
To tell yourself that you will never know the end of the story when everything seemed perfectly in place to succeed at an extraordinary thing, it must be hard to digest.
Indeed… We were having a very good season. Compared to the last exercise we played sustain, it was day and night. We had grown in thickness over the days, we had an incredible series of nine consecutive successes (between November 22 and February 21, editor’s note), I think it will be very difficult to relive such a scenario. Especially from one season to the next, it can be very different. The proof with us.
This will be precisely the difficulty of the next exercise, resetting the dynamics.
The unknown will be there. I don’t think the surprise will work anymore. So we will have to prepare ourselves accordingly. But I sincerely believe that it will be hard to achieve such a beautiful course.
What outcome did you imagine in your season: a semi-final, a final, the title?
No, no, that would be pretentious. To be honest, we wanted to defend our first place and get a semi-final at home, I think it would have been a great reward for all the work accomplished by this group. Afterwards, nothing was forbidden.
all the lights were green
The Columérins will be able to keep preciously the classification at the evening of the 23rd day where they prance at the head of the Pro D2 with 77 points (17 victories, 6 defeats). Columérins ranked ahead of Perpignan, Grenoble, Oyonnax, Nevers and Biarritz, sorry … And that’s not all, the team led by the duo Sarraute-Berneau presents the best defense of the division (381 points), the third best attack (573 points) and ended up in first place in the ranking of registered penalties (82 in total) thanks to his formidable scoring duo Soulan-Girard.
A last surprising figure: the Columérins dominate (by far) the classification of boxes with 37 yellow and 1 red received in 23 days! Did you say “cartoon”?
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