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Stumbled upon this great little piece of writing by John during my research. Gives a bit of a snapshot of the life of a rugby player in France and shows he's got a bit of a sense of humour about him.
Enjoy!
http://www.rupa.com.au/ArticlePage.aspx?PageID=32
ALMOST RUGBYMAN - June 2004
“BRIVE_LA_GAILLARD - postcode 19100 – pop 50,000 – elevation 320m
Brive-la-Gaillard, known for its champion rugby team, is a hole: sprawling, ugly and of virtually no interest.” (P 698, Lonely Planet Guide to France, 4th Edition 2001)
Au contraire! I read this in July of 2001 after signing a contract with Club Athletique Brive and it was far from the truth. Firstly, the team was in second division and far from being champions. As for being an ugly hole, Brive is a classic French town with an ancient stone centre surrounded by beautiful countryside. While there are lots of green hills, open-air markets, old villages, prehistoric caves and grand chateaux, it is true there is not a lot of nightlife action in Brive. And there is definitely no beach - if France was a dartboard, Brive would be slightly south west of the bullseye.
The rugby experience has been a version of Groundhog Day. A complete version, in that what began as an endless repetition of frustration at what I saw as the deficiencies of the approach to rugby here has given way to an enjoyment of what being a rugbyman in France is all about. A bit of success hasn’t hurt either. Brive are now well established in First Division and having secured second spot on the table at the end of the regular season, we are now in the playoffs with the big guns; Toulouse, Stade Francais, and Biarritz. After four seasons in France I finally feel I am almost a French rugbyman.
You know you are turning into a French Rugbyman when:
You don’t pack any rugby gear for the pre-season camp.
Usually a week long July boot camp in a mountain refuge high in the Alps. No rugby balls, no rugby field, no weights, no speed, no handouts, no meetings, just day after day of slogging up and down mountains on foot, on bikes, on canoes and on rafts.
You don’t notice that the majority of your team-mates smoke.
I’m not talking about the odd sneaky one in a nightclub. I’m talking about passing the pack around at every spare moment.
You get the hang of the “ca va”
You effortlessly greet all 30 of your team-mates, the coaches, the staff, the supporters, on a daily basis with an individual handshake. You have been in France too long if you “fait les bis”, the traditional kiss on each cheek, with any of your team-mates.
You don’t care that the quality of training varies like the weather.
Some days it’s good, some days it’s terrible, but you can do nothing about it so just accept it. You do not see fault when the ball is dropped and rapidly adjust to changes in intensity from zero to about 60%. You do not actively look for progress in any way and understand that this is not laziness. You see the link between training performance and the match as extremely tenuous.
You warm up like Cliff Young
Every French team gets ready for kickoff by getting in a very tight huddle behind the front 5 and jogging very slowly up and down the in-goal for 10 minutes. What is important here is the FEELING, the PASSION, the brotherhood.
You envy the other team’s bus.
Forget about frequent flyer points - If Super 12 and Tri-nations is a collection of aeroplane flights then rugby in France is all about long bus trips. The main rugby teams are scattered over the southwestern corner of the hexagon of France, a few in the Alpes to the East and the occasional exception like Stade Francais in Paris. What you want is a really big unit with 2 or 3 card tables, seats that convert into couchettes, good dvd system (to listen to really loud films dubbed into French by the same 3 voices), a fridge, a non smoking section, and in the best scenario the club’s colours and your face plastered all over the side.
You never think about your diet
You drink 10 espressos during the day to stay awake and a bottle of red every night to get
to sleep. I won’t even mention the cheese. A drug test is when you take something to see if it works.
George Ayoub seems like a good referee.
His colleagues in France are so often blatantly incompetent, shockingly biased, and downright cheats that they have made my memories of little Georgie grow fonder. Forget about backchat or abuse – any communication WHATSOEVER is completely forbidden. They adjudicate the game in glorious isolation. Even when captain, it is deemed insolent to ask a question. It may be my karma that I ended up playing under such conditions and no doubt the punishment I deserved. To be fair to them French referees are almost completely amateur and are often in real physical danger of being lynched if the home team loses. This is part of the difficulty of winning away from home in France.
You go the biff
There is none of the sanitised for TV tough guy push and shove here. You are not surprised to find an opponents finger knuckle deep in your eye socket while his mate attempts to simultaneously circumcise and sterilize you. While this is common and results in little reaction from the crowd or indeed the players, the mildest of rucking (and I really do mean the gentlest scraping of stud over a ball inhibiting flank or thigh) results in an all in brawl, the stands in uproar and usually a yellow card. Further karma…
You feel well organised when you know what time training is for tomorrow.
You understand why, when first employed by the club and shown his office, my current coach responded, “Why the hell would I need an office”.
You understand and use the “Classement Britannique”.
This is a (French!) system of reinterpreting the competition ladder by assuming that teams should win all their home games and lose all the away games.
You read Midi Olympique.
You call the national weekly rugby newspaper “Le Midol” and buy it every Monday to see if you are among “les meilleurs”.
You sign another contract at the age of 33………
You start listening to Jimmy Buffet:
“He went to Paris looking for answers
To questions that bothered him so
He was impressive, young and aggressive
Saving the world on his own.
But the warm Summer breezes
The French wines and cheeses
Put his ambition at bay
And Summers and Winters
Scattered like splinters
And four or five years slipped away.”
This was the photo that went with the story... a slightly more sinister looking John than the one we're used to huh?
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