Jean Bouilhou, Toulouse forwards coach, after the heavy defeat at the Stade Français (48-14):
« It’s a dirty night. We had prepared the meeting so as to appear well from the start and it’s a bit the opposite that happened. We ran after the score without ever being able to find solutions. The guys hung on the whole game, but we couldn’t get our game going. We dropped a lot, a lot of balloons. However, when you have no balls and you can’t manage to line up two playing times, it’s more complicated. We lacked people but they are missing in all clubs. We had prepared for that period. However, we missed this match, as we missed last week’s against Lyon (9-16). Now that’s enough, we can’t wait to find Castres next week. It’s obvious that at Stade Toulousain we can’t take 50 points like that away from home. We are going to put this match aside, we are not going to make a lot of it, we will analyze what happened and move on. We hope to recover some players against Castres. Stade Français had prepared well for its match and we did not take the temperature quickly enough of the way it played. Defeats, the guys have lived and will live others. The important thing, now, is not to rehash the defeat but to seek the surplus of energy and cohesion to start again. “
– –
Baptiste Germain, scrum half from Stade Toulousain:
“I think we stayed in the locker room the first twenty minutes. We did not know how to respect what we said at the start of the match. Afterwards, we tried to do what we could, but it was complicated. We tried to show another image even if the score increased as we went along. Behind, we will have to bounce back against Castres from next week. It’s a home game, we’ll have to win. For us young people, this evening was the occasion to show ourselves. The coach trusts us, we tell ourselves that this is a period when we will be able to work even more to show the tip of our nose. We will remember a lot of things from this match. We will have to work on the points where we were the weakest, not to make the same mistakes against Castres. We made a lot of hand mistakes, including when we had the opportunity to score. We rushed too much on balloons when we didn’t have to, and we delayed too much on others when we should have rushed. Personally, I’m still happy to have played my first match with Toulouse in the Top 14. Above all, I was arrested for a month because of the Covid-19 at the start of the season. I could not wait. The score is swollen, but I’m happy with this first in this jersey. I hope it won’t be the last. The Covid? I learned I was infected the weekend the Championship resumed. I knew that Antoine Dupont and Alexis Balès were present, and that it would be complicated to play, but I would have at least liked to continue my momentum from the two friendlies played during the summer. And in the end, this is what happened to me, we don’t control it, I spent ten complicated days followed by two and a half weeks in isolation. The recovery was tough, but now it’s behind me. “
– – .
