Top 14 Final prediction: Toulouse ‘firepower’ to blow Montpellier away as 25th Bouclier de Brennus awaits
Jack Willis and Lenni Nouchi will face off in the Top 14 final.
15 years on from the only previous time these two clubs met for the Bouclier de Brennus, the Top 14 delivers a final rooted in pure Occitanie.
Toulouse won that 2011 decider 15-10, a grind nobody who was there remembers fondly. The rematch carries a heavier billing, and history expects: win in Saint-Denis and Ugo Mola’s side claim a fourth consecutive title, a feat the club has managed only once, the great side of Cazalbou, Deylaud and Califano that ruled France from 1994 to 1997. For the most decorated club the championship has known, 24 shields already in the cabinet, this is a chase against their own ghosts.
The two semi-finals amplified the collision of styles waiting at the Stade de France. Toulouse went to the Vélodrome and produced an exhibition of trademark Stade rugby, 10 tries and 71 points against a Racing 92 side that could not live with the tempo and physicality, the biggest winning margin in French play-off history. 24 hours later, on the same pitch, Montpellier reduced rugby to its oldest principles and beat Stade Français 25-15 with a single try and the metronomic boot of Domingo Miotti.
So the framing writes itself: the champions’ coronation against the upstart’s ambush, firepower against friction, the team that wants the game played at 100 miles an hour against the team desperate to slow it to walking pace. Toulouse are favourites, deservedly so, with two thirds of the LNR’s own public poll behind them. But Montpellier did precisely this in 2022, gatecrashing a final as outsiders and walking off with the shield, a reminder that finals have a habit of forgetting form.
There is a warning buried in last year’s final, too. Toulouse needed a full 100 minutes and Thomas Ramos’s flawless boot, eight from eight off the tee, to edge Bordeaux-Bègles 39-33 in an extra-time epic among the finest French finals played. It was brutal, attritional rugby in sapping heat, the pitch surface past 40 degrees, bodies dropping through cramp and exhaustion. François Cros admitted afterwards he had shed five kilograms of water, proof that a procession on paper is no guarantee of a procession on grass.
Where the game will be won
Everything for Toulouse flows from ruck speed. When their breakdown hums, when the ball is recycled in two seconds rather than three, Antoine Dupont becomes the most dangerous man in world rugby, free to attack either edge with glee, picking off tiring defenders on whichever touchline he fancies. Against Racing, the support lines connected and the game became a procession. The single most important number on Saturday will not appear on any scoreboard. It is the speed of Toulouse’s ball.
The presence of two genuine playmakers sharpens that threat further. With Ramos restored at full-back alongside Romain Ntamack at 10, Toulouse can run their attack through two distributors who both kick goals, both pass off either hand and both pull the strings from first receiver. It doubles the kicking game, stretches the field laterally and means Montpellier never quite know where the next problem is coming from. A back three holding deep for Ramos leaves space in the line for Ntamack to attack, and the reverse is equally true.
There is a tactical point worth naming for the purists. Both of these sides run their back-rows the French way, left and right, each flanker fixed to his own side of the pitch and staying there, rather than the openside and blindside model where the two roam across the field and swap sides to chase the ball from one breakdown to the next. Fixed flankers turn the contest territorial: who wins his channel, who dominates the gainline on his touchline, phase after phase after phase. Whoever owns those collisions owns the field position.
Montpellier’s route is narrow and obvious: slow the ruck, win the collisions, kick the points. Joan Caudullo’s men did not score after the 16th minute against Stade Français and still won comfortably, because Miotti landed six penalties and the defence refused to crack. They will want a knife fight, a contest of patience and field position where Toulouse’s tempo is strangled before it can build. The suspension of Yacouba Camara, a specialist in exactly the kind of breakdown larceny that slows quick ball, robs them of a key tool in that plan. If they cannot disrupt the ruck, the avalanche comes.
And if it goes the distance, the finishers favour Toulouse heavily. Mola can summon a bench stacked with internationals: Julien Marchand, Thibaud Flament, the box-of-tricks Ange Capuozzo, and in all likelihood Blair Kinghorn, a Scotland and Lions-class operator covering 10 and 15, held back to be unleashed on tiring legs. Montpellier’s replacements are honest and willing, without being in that class. In a final that 12 months ago needed 100 minutes to settle, the gulf between the two benches may yet prove the most decisive number on the night.
What they said
Mola, as ever, has leaned into doubt rather than away from it. The Toulouse manager spoke after the semi about uncertainty being a form of nourishment for his group, a fuel that keeps a serial winner sharp rather than complacent. It is a familiar refrain from a coach who has built a dynasty on never quite letting his players believe the job is done.
Cros offered the same steel from a player’s mouth. He described the quadruple as one of the squad’s genuine motivations, while insisting that a 71-point semi-final had won them nothing yet. On Dupont, freshly returned from a month out and the target of weeks of outside criticism, Cros was unequivocal that the dressing room never doubted their scrum-half, and that the big occasions are where the very best announce themselves.
From the Montpellier camp, the tone is all defiance. Caudullo, visibly moved on the Vélodrome turf, spoke simply of his pride in coaching this group. The week’s loudest line from the Hérault has been a promise to take the fight to Toulouse, a declaration that they are ready to wage war. Fulgence Ouédraogo, the club’s former captain and a man who knows what a Montpellier upset looks like, talked of a side riding a powerful momentum. Belief, in the south, is not in short supply.
Players to watch
For Toulouse, the eye goes first to François Cros, back to his imperious best in the semi with a try inside the opening quarter, four duels won and the relentless contact work that holds a back-row together. He is the glue of this side, the captain in all but armband, the engine that lets the artists play. At the controls, Romain Ntamack is purring again after a stop-start season, 19 points and a flawless nine from nine off the tee in the semi as the premium half-back axis injuries had broken up was finally reunited. Alongside him, Antoine Dupont needs little restating: a month out did nothing to dull the world’s best nine, and with quick ball in front of him he is the single biggest reason the champions start as favourites.
Montpellier’s hopes rest on a different kind of back-row power. Billy Vunipola has a stage made for him, his go-forward and ballast over the gainline central to any plan to bully Toulouse in the tight. Out wide, Donovan Taofifenua arrives as the unlikeliest of heroes; injuries and a stuttering first season after his move from Racing left him short of form, before he rediscovered himself in the run-in, a decisive try at Castres and six for the campaign. His semi turned on one extraordinary act, a 60-metre cover sprint to haul down Joe Marchant on the line and deny a near-certain try, the moment that probably booked this final. Steering it all is Ali Price, the 68-times capped Scotland scrum-half and a 2021 Lions Test starter, bringing the big-match calm Montpellier need and a kicking game vital to the field-position fight.
Main head-to-head
Lenni Nouchi v Jack Willis. Two back-row leaders, both in the form of their lives, both carrying their team’s emotional charge into the biggest night of the season. Willis is the breakdown predator and the line-breaking carrier, the man who turns a stable platform into broken-field bedlam. Nouchi is the athletic captain, leaner by the best part of seven kilos this season and sharper for it, who has hauled Montpellier to a final nobody outside the Hérault saw coming, equally at home stealing ball, carrying hard or marshalling a defence that conceded almost nothing after the opening exchanges in Marseille.
As noted previously, because both clubs fix their flankers sides, Nouchi and Willis will not spend the night locked onto each other the way two roaming opensides would; each patrols his own channel instead. So this is a duel of influence rather than a running collision: who imposes himself more on his patch, who wins more of the breakdowns and gainlines on his watch, who drags his side forward when the game tightens.
A team can lose a final like this without the two protagonists ever trading a direct hit. If Nouchi slows Toulouse’s ball and bends his channel, Montpellier have a platform. If Willis gets to the rucks first and keeps the tempo high, the firepower behind him does the rest.
Prediction
Montpellier will make it a war, and for 50 minutes they may even win it. The boot of Miotti, the granite of Vunipola and Nouchi, the discipline that strangled Stade Français, all of it can keep the scoreboard close while the light fades over Saint-Denis. Finals reward exactly this kind of bloody-mindedness, and the Hérault have it in abundance.
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But it won’t be enough. Toulouse have too much firepower, too much tempo, too many ways to hurt you. Once the ruck speed comes and Dupont starts attacking both edges, with Ramos and Ntamack pulling the strings in tandem, the dam breaks and the points will flow in a rush. A grind for an hour, then a procession.
Champions again, the 1994-97 dynasty equalled, and a Top 14 massacre in the long Parisian dusk.
Toulouse 46-18 Montpellier
Probable teams
Toulouse: 15 Thomas Ramos, 14 Teddy Thomas, 13 Pierre-Louis Barassi, 12 Santiago Chocobares, 11 Matthis Lebel, 10 Romain Ntamack, 9 Antoine Dupont, 8 Alexandre Roumat, 7 Jack Willis (c), 6 François Cros, 5 Joshua Brennan, 4 Emmanuel Meafou, 3 Joel Merkler, 2 Peato Mauvaka, 1 Rodrigue Neti
Replacements: 16 Julien Marchand, 17 David Ainu’u, 18 Clément Vergé, 19 Thibaud Flament, 20 Paul Graou, 21 Kalvin Gourgues, 22 Ange Capuozzo, 23 Dorian Aldegheri
Montpellier: 15 Tom Banks, 14 Gabriel Ngandebe, 13 Arthur Vincent, 12 Auguste Cadot, 11 Donovan Taofifenua, 10 Domingo Miotti, 9 Ali Price, 8 Billy Vunipola, 7 Alexandre Bécognée, 6 Lenni Nouchi (c), 5 Tyler Duguid, 4 Florian Verhaeghe, 3 Mohamed Haouas, 2 Jordan Uelese, 1 Baptiste Erdocio
Replacements: 16 Christopher Tolofua, 17 Enzo Forletta, 18 Adam Beard, 19 Alexander Masibaka, 20 Léo Coly, 21 Justo Piccardo, 22 Thomas Darmon, 23 Wilfrid Hounkpatin
Venue: Stade de France
Kick-off: 21:05 local (20:05 BST)
Referee: Luc Ramos
How to watch: Premier Sports