For over two hours, the rugby players from Nice work on the fundamentals of the game. The players are eager to start the championship against Annonay in two weeks.
Two weeks before the championship resumes, the rugby players from Nice are getting ready. The Arboras Stadium, like an arena, the players like gladiators. There is fighting, blood, and courage. The training sessions are of rare intensity.
Guillaume Guarese, Julien Gaonach, Adrien Malabard, Sylvain Bottero, and their teammates, all smiles before, finish the grueling two-hour training exhausted, staggering, and washed out.
First, there are workshops where they work on the basics of rugby, the fundamentals in the jargon: tackling, releasing, passing after contact, clearing… All these drills are conducted at a hellish pace, made even more exhausting by the heat of this Wednesday evening. One word to describe the intensity: impressive.
The players perform as if in an official match. They need to prove to the coaches that they want to be starters.
To finish, game phases are repeated, launched from scrums and lineouts. The coaches explain, recalibrate. Sometimes pedagogical, sometimes authoritarian and yelling, no matter the manner, the message must get across. Words from the coaches: “If you’re scared, don’t play rugby. There are other sports”, “the action starts well but ends poorly, that’s not right, guys!!!”, “go back to simple and basic things, you watch too much TV”, “there, that’s it! Multiply the play, that’s how it will work.”
The coaches are perfectionists: every action must be perfect and enhanced, without errors, the players must make the right decision, the one that will advance the game and cross the advantage line. They emphasize clearing around the ruck to facilitate the release of the ball and speed up the action to take advantage of the opponent’s poor replacement.
Alas, perfection does not exist, and even if Christian Cauvy rips his cap off and Philippe Buchet raises his voice, the rugby players from Nice appear sharp and determined.
No doubt their opponents in Fédérale 2 are also training hard. They are firmly waiting for the newcomer from Nice, who has shown its ambitions with recruitment at the level of its objectives. Eagerly awaiting the start of the championship.
Vincent Trinquat