Stade Toulousain: and now what winter?
The Toulousains first in the ranking now come in a very complicated month of January followed by the period of duplicates. For what result?
The Indian New Year’s Eve that we had the pleasure of experiencing would therefore only be a sham. Winter will eventually arrive even if the Game of Thrones series has left our screens without a series of this standing having taken over. Yes winter will come eventually. Even for the sunniest teams like Stade Toulousain. It is in this sense that we must read the calendar of the red-and-black club. Winter is in preparation. And with it its possible skids and exits from the roads. Because it will be necessary to be very strong to control the sequence of events. Let’s start with January. The Stadium will indeed chain two trips for the less delicate in the Top 14. First of all, on January 1 (but yes…) in Clermont on appeal, after his defeat in Brive. And follow up with a visit to Stade Rochelais, always over-motivated against the club against whom he lost two finals. And if we add that La Rochelle are already behind two defeats at home…
Two Top 14 matches away from home to prepare for the trip to Sale in the Champions Cup, the first knock on the door for a possible eighth or even quarter-final at home. And we end with the receptions of Munster and the reigning French champion Montpellier (false duplicate). It will then be time to enter the period of doubloons…
A first trap stopped
You will therefore have understood that the title of autumn champion of Stade Toulousain could be very fragile. And, with this in mind, having provided the essentials against Castres on Friday evening at the Stadium is certainly a positive point. Especially since the content of the match being made up of a lot of approximations, the staff has a few areas of work for the coming week as Laurent Thuéry acknowledges: “We hope not to fall into a somewhat approximate game with passes in the defense not always very well felt, that’s how it is. We didn’t make the game easy by playing the wrong game, especially with too many passes in front of the defence. »
The staff knows, however, that he can count on a very homogeneous workforce with the competition at all positions in the forward line in particular. This will favor the mandatory rotations of January, the importance of which escapes no one within the club…