Non-stop season to challenge the best

NO ONE has ever denied – no one has ever been able to deny – that the French rugby season is an ultra-marathon rather than a sprint. But when the World Cup comes around it takes on ferocious ironman triathlon levels.

- JAMES HARRINGTON

The current Top 14 season kicked off on Saturday, September 4, 2022. It will end, for seven teams, on Sunday, May 28, 2023, when all matches on the final round of the campaign kick-off at the same time.

But for the top six sides, and the 13th-placed side in the French top flight, there’s still between one and three matches of post-season rugby to play. The campaign only winds up for the finalists, in Saint-Denis late on Saturday, June 17, when one side will lift the Bouclier de Brennus, and the now-ubiquitous Freed From Desire will play out for the victors and will be the soundtrack of frustrated disappointment for the losers.

Just 63 days later, on Saturday, August 19, the 2023-24 Top 14 campaign gets under way, for those players not involved in the World Cup.

It’s not the shortest period between domestic seasons in France – the 2016-17 campaign, for example, kicked off less than two months after a certain Dan Carter had guided 14-player Racing 92 to the Brennus in Barcelona at the end of the World Cup-affected 201516 season.

But it still doesn’t leave much time for players to rest and recuperate from one arduous campaign before they have to start prepping for another. Remember, in those 63 days, players will have to fit in a holiday, pre-season, and warm-up games.