Toulouse v Montpellier: Five takeaways as Jack Willis follows in Jonny Wilkinson’s footsteps on history-making evening for French aristocrats
Toulouse celebrate try against Montpellier in Top 14 final and their captain Jack Willis.
Following a 28-20 victory for Toulouse over Montpellier on Saturday, here’s our five takeaways from the Top 14 final at the Stade de France.
A final the elements refused to leave alone
Some finals are remembered for a try, others for a man, but this one will be remembered for the sky. It began in a furnace, 36 degrees pitchside as the teams walked out, heat that turned the closing stages of the first half into a test of conditioning rather than ambition. By the second half the weather had swung to the other extreme, thunderstorms rolling over Saint-Denis, the surface greasing up, and then lightning forking above 80,000 people and forcing the officials to take the players off altogether.
A Top 14 final, the showpiece of the European club game, stopped in its tracks by the storm with Toulouse 15 points clear and seemingly home. When the players came back out cold, the match had a second life nobody had anticipated as MHR took Stade Toulousain right down to the wire.
If you wanted to explain to a newcomer why the French final is the best single day in the club game, you would sit them in front of this one and let the weather, the noise and the quality make the argument for you.
The physical battle reached a level few finals match
Strip away the theatre and the foundation of this final was a forward collision of brutal intensity. Two heavyweight packs went at each other from the first whistle and the breakdown became a war that barely paused for breath.
Montpellier had built their season on set-piece power and a maul that took Ulster apart in the Challenge Cup final, and they brought every ounce of it to Paris. Lenni Nouchi set the tone early by stealing a Toulouse lineout and snuffing out the drive before it could start, and Joshua Brennan answered with a lineout steal of his own five metres from his own line. Billy Vunipola, who recovered from the knee scare that threatened his involvement, got his hands on Toulouse ball at the breakdown and gave Montpellier the go-forward they needed through the middle hour.
Emmanuel Meafou and Peato Mauvaka carried like men possessed for Toulouse, and the counter-rucking from the champions was, at its best, ferocious enough to blow Montpellier off their own possession. This was a contest decided in the contact area as much as anywhere, collisions read and won by players whose understanding of that part of the game is total.
The cost of fighting so hard at the breakdown showed in the penalty count, with Toulouse pinged repeatedly for going beyond the line of the ball, but the intent never wavered. In heat like that, sustaining the intensity for eighty minutes should not have been possible. Both packs found a way, and the quality of the physical exchange will stand as one of the finest seen in a French final for years.
Mauvaka and Willis the difference for Toulouse
Champions tend to have the players who decide the biggest days, and Toulouse had two of them. Mauvaka produced a final for the ages from hooker, a position that rarely owns a Brennus showpiece. His first try at seven minutes was pure invention, throwing into his own lineout, taking the ball straight back off Antoine Dupont and breaking 50 metres down the right before selling a filthy dummy to score. His second came from a brilliant line break that Dupont recycled at pace, the hooker arriving to finish what he had started. A brace, a dummy good enough to lead any highlight reel, and a shift in defence that topped the charts for defenders beaten.
Dupont ran the game in the first hour, controlling territory with a kicking game that piled up close to 471 metres before he was rested. The man who closed it out, though, was the captain. Jack Willis took the player of the match award for a performance built on the dirty, decisive work, two crucial turnovers in quick succession late on that snuffed out Montpellier’s surge when the heist was threatening to come off.
He led from the front exactly when his side needed steadying, and it was no surprise the armband sat with him. The third Toulouse try, finished after multiple phases with Blair Kinghorn straightening the line before the final pass, was the basics executed so accurately it looked simple, the hardest thing of all to defend against a side with Montpellier’s line speed.
Santiago Chocobares, cleared from his concussion doubt only days earlier, added real venom in midfield and Montpellier had no equivalent to any of it.
Montpellier’s heart was undeniable
It would be a disservice to Montpellier to file them as plucky losers. This is a side that arrived in Paris having lost only two matches in the entire calendar year, riding an 11-match winning run, with the Challenge Cup already in the cabinet after dismantling Ulster. They were ninth last season and they have become one of the form teams in Europe, and for long passages of this final they were the better side. They had more of the ball, more of the territory, and they defended Toulouse’s strike plays with real organisation, reading switches and blocking passes that would have carved lesser teams open.
When Francois Cros missed a tackle on Leo Coly after the restart, they punished it instantly as the replacement screamed over, and through Ali Price, the battered but defiant Tom Banks, and a captain in Nouchi who emptied himself completely, they hauled the deficit back to eight and made the closing minutes a genuine contest. What beat them was not effort and it was not quality. It was the failure to convert chances into points at the decisive moments, the knock-on after winning a huge late scrum, the handling errors close to the Toulouse line that they had not made all season.
They had the opportunities to win this final and they did not kill their opponents off. There is an old truth in this competition that you have to lose a final before you understand how to win one. Montpellier served that apprenticeship tonight, and a team that genuinely believed it could win will be better for the scars.
A dynasty that endures
When the whistle finally went, Toulouse had their 25th French title and a fourth in succession, a record in the professional era and another chapter in a period of dominance that has no parallel in the European game. The number alone tells one story.
The manner of this victory tells another. With the lead cut to eight, the storm overhead and Dupont rested before being rolled back on at fly-half to close it out, Toulouse leaned on something the scoreboard cannot measure, the calm of a group that has been in tighter finals and knows exactly how to win them.
It was fitting that Willis lifted the Bouclier de Brennus, the first Englishman to do so as captain since Jonny Wilkinson. Toulouse win because they produce French talent in volume, which feeds both the team and their salary cap room, and because they marry that to a ruthlessness that surfaces precisely when matches tighten. Rivals may close the gap as budgets shift around them, and the chasing pack will take heart from how Montpellier pushed the champions tonight.
For now, though, the dynasty stands. Toulouse did not produce their finest rugby for 80 minutes, and they did not need to. They did what great champions do, absorbing a real scare and finding the answers, and they walked away with the trophy that has come to feel like theirs by right.