Toulouse. Gijs Jorna: “We are ready for this fight”
The Toulouse captain was delighted with his team’s first success in play-down last night at home against Nantes (3-1). A good operation in the race to maintain.
Gijs, is it the slowdown that predominates after this success against Nantes?
We all knew the importance of this game. We saw on the first day that all the teams were going to fight like starving people. We had played against them twice in the regular season and we had lost both times (3-1 in Toulouse, 3-2 in Nantes, editor’s note) but each time with the feeling that we could and should have done better. It was more us who had lost these two games than Nantes who had dominated us. We wanted to change that. We had two good first sets and the break took us out of the game a bit unfortunately.
You led 17-14 in this third set before finally losing it: were you afraid to raise them at that time?
We had difficulty regaining our momentum from the first two races. We started to make more mistakes, especially in attack. Of course, there was a lot of stress at the start of the fourth set. It wasn’t a very nice set frankly (he smiles), but we fought and that’s what had to be done.
The bench also contributed a lot, notably with 12 points for Antoine Pothron and 8 for Joachim Panou. It’s called a good sign for the sequel, isn’t it?
OUI bien sur. “Sapi” (Stéphane Sapinart, coach, editor’s note) warned us that everyone would be affected. We are finally complete for one of the first times of the season. On a quality on the bench. Tonight was the turn of some, the next game will be others and that’s fine.
These are three important points in the race to maintain, especially since Cannes and Cambrai, which follow you in the ranking, have also won…
The play-down is a mini-championship with six likely teams of the same level so it is suspended. All the points will count very expensive because everyone wants to stay in League A. We are ready for this fight.