Top 14 talking points: And then there were eight
With three rounds of the regular Top 14 season to go, eight teams are left in the hunt for just six play-off places
On the weekend that Montauban’s long-anticipated relegation from the Top 14 was finally confirmed, a definitive break in the field at the title-chasing play-off end of the table also came.
With three rounds of the regular season remaining, the race for the top six is down to eight teams. Well, seven – top-of-the-table Toulouse have a play-off spot in the bag. Their concern now is ensuring a top-two finish.
The remainder of the top six – Montpellier, Pau, Stade Francais, Clermont and Bordeaux – are jockeying for final positions, too, while the last two in particular are looking to hold off the covetous attentions of Racing 92 and La Rochelle.
Further down the table, the season is as good as over three rounds early for Toulon, Castres, Lyon and Bayonne. With Montauban now officially down, and Perpignan openly and unapologetically prepping for a promotion-relegation play-off against the losing side in the ProD2 final, none of them are in danger of relegation.
None of them have a top-six shot. A Champions Cup berth officially remains a possible target for all four, but – realistically – only Toulon have a shot, and even then they need implosion-level help from above.
Here, then, are the results from the 23rd round of 26.
Pau 27 - 15 Castres
Castres have to get a grip on their discipline problems. It has to be a top-of-the-agenda issue for preseason, as it’s far too late in this one for anything to have an effect.
Two yellow cards cost them a win at Lyon two weeks ago, on the other side of the Champions Cup semi-final weekend. Two yellow cards and 16 penalties – most of them in the second half – cost Castres a shot at a win at high-flying Pau on Saturday.
It doesn’t take a maths genius to realise that’s eight points lost in their last two outings. How many more have been lost this season? Enough to be in the top six? It’s not impossible.
“Right at the start of the second half, there was a penalty called against our winger. From that, a penalty kick to touch, and a try,” manager Xavier Sadourny said. “After that, it was a series of penalties, indiscipline, and cards. My frustration stems from that start to the second half, because Pau were bothered by us.
“We were down to 14 twice. The match could have gone our way with more favourable circumstances.”
Sadourny’s not one to publicly berate his side for long. “I’m very happy with the players’ effort,” he said – and it’s not as if they were all bad.
“We knew we were playing against a very, very strong team that’s confident, unlike us. It’s not all bad – quite the opposite – we competed well for a good part of the match.”
Hooker Pierre Colonna, too, wanted to look up from the wreckage of Castres’ season: “Now it comes down to the players and what we want. Whether we’re going to give up with three games left, or whether we’re going to pick ourselves up despite everything and finish the season on a high note.”
Pau boss Sebastien Piqueronies, on the other hand, was relieved, as his side maintained their winning run at home – they’re the only side with an unbeaten home record standing this season. “Given our lack of clinical finishing in the first half, I’m very happy to have simply beaten Castres.
“Since I arrived here, I haven’t beaten Castres that often. So I'm very happy that Section managed to beat this club twice this season. It’s a real indicator of progress.”
Clermont 45 - 14 Perpignan
“We got the job done, but I’m not satisfied,” Clermont manager Christophe Urios said after his side picked up an imperfect bonus-point win at home over promotion-relegation play-off side Perpignan. “We’ll have to do better.”
He wasn’t the only five-point winner to be less-than impressed with what he saw from the touchline on Saturday. Arguably, he was a little unforgiving – his side started slowly, but dominated the set piece, the contacts, ruled the second half and were never in any real jeopardy as they built a six-try victory to double down on their win over Toulouse at Stadium Toulouse a fortnight earlier.
“I also know that one game doesn’t make a season,” he went on. “We’ll see in Pau [Clermont’s next match – their season run-in then sees them at home to Racing and away at Bordeaux]: it’ll be a big test, and it’ll be interesting to see how we develop.
“We need to pick up points everywhere in this league, because qualifying for the top six is going to come down to a very high points total.”
It’s likely the root cause of Urios’s dissatisfaction was the side on the other side of the halfway line. With their focus firmly on the 27th match of the season, Perpignan had swapped out a number of key players for the trip into volcano country.
And manager Laurent Labit made no bones about his priorities. “If we’d come with our strongest lineup and given up 45 points, then I’d be worried, but that’s not the case … Top 14 matches, with four games left in the season, when everyone is fighting for points, require an extra dose of heart — they demand something special.
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“For those with nothing to play for, it’s hard to compete with teams that are on a roll heading into the play-offs. We have to give young players experience so they can understand the level of competition and the work that needs to be done.”
Bayonne 38 - 40 Bordeaux
Champions Cup finalists Bordeaux have a player-management problem. Yannick Bru would have loved to have rested numerous key players for the weekend’s trip down France’s Atlantic coast to Bayonne. But their precarious hold on a Top 14 play-off place meant that option wasn’t open to the boss.
They came into the weekend with 60 points in the bag, level with seventh-placed Racing. Defeat at Bayonne’s shattered Stade Jean Dauger fortress would have posed real problems for their twin-front title ambitions – to say nothing of their to-be-decided seeding for next season’s Champions Cup.
This is why manager Yannick Bru included most of his key Champions Cup semi-final heroes in Saturday’s squad. Matthieu Jalibert and Louis Bielle-Biarrey – alongside Marko Gazotti and Gaetan Barlot — were on the bench, while Maxime Lucu, Ben Tameifuna (his 200th Top 14 outing), Yoram Moefana, Maxime Lamothe, Boris Palu, Cameron Woki, and Salesi Rayasi all started. No rest for the talented.
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But even that squad, against a Basque side that hadn’t won at Jean Dauger in 2026, struggled until Jalibert and Bielle-Biarrey came on early in the second half. The winger scored, of course he did, 12 minutes later, as Bordeaux fought back from 38-19 down on the hour to take a 40-38 lead with four minutes to play in a remarkable match.
“It was the team spirit that won for us,” Bordeaux’s scrum-coach Jean-Baptiste Poux said afterwards. “There are many things to review and correct, but what we take away from this is that the team never gave up. We knew that if we had a bad game, we would be out of the running.”
And captain Lucu, rather wryly, added: “We sometimes sabotage ourselves. But when our backs are against the wall, we rise to the occasion. We’re still alive in the Top 14. I’d sometimes prefer to be a little more relaxed, but that’s how we’re built.”
Perpignan next, for Bordeaux before Leinster in Bilbao, then Toulon away and Clermont at home to round of the league part of their season, as they seek to hold on to their play-off place.
Montpellier 59 - 7 Montauban
Montauban’s long-anticipated relegation at the end of the season was finally confirmed on Saturday, after they shipped another half-century of points, this time to the brutally direct attack of Montpellier.
Sebastien Tillous-Borde’s side now hold the record for the most points conceded in a single Top 14 season – 1,134, including 165 tries, another record – with matches against Stade Francais, La Rochelle, and Pau still to play.
For Montauban this season is nothing more than living history. Tillous-Borde is already working on next season back in the ProD2 and beyond. He blooded six academy players in senior rugby at the Septeo Stadium.
“They were all very committed,” Tillous-Borde said afterwards of his young guns. “They’ve all been training with us for eight months, and we put them there because we felt they were capable of competing.
“We lacked finishing, and consistency in moments when we should be scoring. But honestly, I didn’t see any difference between them and the senior players.”
Montpellier’s inside centre Justo Piccardo joined an exclusive club, scoring four of the hosts’ nine tries as they fairly bulldozed Montauban off the park to make amends for escaping Stade Sapiac with a draw in the early rounds of the season.
Stade Francais 59 - 17 Lyon
Stade’s fourth in their last five matches. Eight tries scored, taking their season total to 93, and a try-scoring bonus. Fourth place consolidated; second – and its semi-final bye – very much within reach. What’s not to like about their 59-17 win over a much-changed and lacklustre Lyon?
Plenty, apparently. “If we had faced a top team today, I think we would have struggled,” fly-half Louis Carbonel said immediately afterwards. “We had trouble finding our structure, finding our rhythm … we couldn’t implement our gameplan.
“If we keep performing like this, we’ll run into some hiccups. It’s a wake-up call. I hope that in the upcoming matches, especially next week, we’ll be more focused.”
He had a point. Despite their attacking efficiency, notably off first-phase, a game-changing impact off the bench and an ever-solid set piece, Stade were far from convincing at Jean Bouin. Too many avoidable errors made for a choppy performance, despite the scoreline.
It was, according to manager Paul Gustard, ‘a warning shot’.
But. Despite it all, Stade have five more points in the bag, and are a step closer to a home play-off a season after avoiding the Top 14 survival play-off by a solitary point. That’s got to be worth something.
Carbonel thinks so: “It keeps us in contention for qualification, the chance to play a home playoff, and maybe even more. Right now, we’re trying to win our next two matches to secure a home play-off. And if our rivals slip up, that’ll just be a bonus.”
And they have a chance to tune their game. Their next two games are against Montauban and Bayonne, two sides with little to play for except pride. The same could be true of La Rochelle, who they visit on the final weekend of the season.
Toulon 27 - 51 Toulouse
Nearly 67,000 fans at Orange Velodrome for the annual relocated match between Toulon and Toulouse boosted the Top 14’s crowd figures for the season – which, at an average 15,923 per match, were already up two percent year on year, according to an LNR statement in April.
They saw Romain Ntamack and Antoine Dupont, on his first Top 14 outing in Marseille, in international form. Cue a Midi Olympique front-page splash reading The bosses’ round, and a The duo are back headline from L’Equipe.
One match is no real sample size, but French rugby is desperately seeking an consistent uptick in Dupont’s form, in particular. In the months following his return from a second ACL injury to his right knee, he has fluctuated between too-rarely sublime and more often – in elite sport terms – merely human.
Such has been the issue that former France captain-turned-pundit-everyone-listens-to Thierry Dusautoir explained in a recent and strongly worded post on LinkedIn why everyone should wind in their necks.
Toulouse have been quietly working to get him back to the other-worldly standards we’ve come to expect. “Antoine is working hard — we’re not going easy on him," assistant forwards coach Virgile Lacombe said after the Marseille result. “We’re trying to put him under pressure, to put him in tough situations in training where he has to make the right choices, because we feel that’s what he needs right now.”
Saturday night — one try, two assists, generally on the money – was evidence that their, and his, hard work is starting to pay off. Just at the right time.
After this recovery win following their surprise loss at home to Clermont last week, manager Ugo Mola doesn’t want his charges to let-up. “Well done, lads,” he told them in a fully loaded pep talk on the Velodrome pitch after the match. “Now there should be only one thing on our minds: we’re done with being lukewarm … We’re done with being lukewarm – and tonight you weren’t.”
Racing 92 24 - 26 La Rochelle
A couple of days before Sunday’s primetime Top 14 weekend closer, La Rochelle backrow Oscar Jegou what-iffed a possible future in which they made the play-offs. “We’d be unstoppable,” he insisted.
It seemed an unlikely proposition. La Rochelle were ninth, six points adrift of their seventh-placed hosts, and had never won at La Defense Arena. Defeat on Sunday would have ended their top six hopes altogether.
Their league position and the scale of the challenge have been why the club’s staff have maintained a poker face in public when quizzed on the prospect. But manager Ronan O’Gara finally broke cover after his side’s first – and, given that Racing are set to return almost exclusively to their old Colombes stomping ground midway through next season, possibly last – win at the concert hall venue.
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O’Gara wasn’t particularly interested in that record. His concerns were more practical. “If we hadn’t won here, our dream of winning the Brennus would have been over.
We’re alive, that’s all. [But] we could finish in the top six. And as long as there’s hope, I’m going to give all my time to this great group of players.”
He’s right. The win kept La Rochelle hanging on to seventh-placed Racing’s coat-tails, who in turn saw their grip on sixth-placed Bordeaux’s heels loosened as they lost at home for the first time this season. That’s all.
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Racing have the advantage on La Rochelle as they seek to right a self-imposed wrong of last season, when they failed to qualify for the play-offs for the first time since they returned to the Top 14 in 2009.
Neither side’s run-in is straightforward. Racing’s penultimate-round trip to Clermont is sandwiched between home matches against Toulon and Toulouse, while La Rochelle host Toulouse and Stade Francais either side of an away day in Montauban.
So, 23 rounds down, just three to go. Here’s the table, with eight teams in the running for six play-off places.
Looking for insightful French rugby content from someone who really knows the state of the game? My name is James Harrington. I’m a France-based freelance sports journalist, and I write mostly about French club and international rugby.
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You can read my French rugby column in The Rugby Paper every Sunday. I round-up Top 14, Champions and Challenge Cup and international action for the Irish Examiner, as well as for Rugbypass. I have also done bits for Rugby World, and cover the HSBC SVNS for svns.com
