On the eve of the first semi-final of Top 14 of the season, between Bayonne and Toulouse in Lyon, Arthur Iturria, the captain of the rowing, warns the champions of France that if they think they are facing a small team on which they will be able to walk, they are mistaken.
Friday evening in Lyon (9:05 p.m.), Toulouse and Bayonne will open the semi-finals ball of this top 14 season. On paper, the immense favorite of this first poster which will precede another, Saturday evening still in the Rhône between Bordeaux-Bègles and Toulon, it will obviously be this Toulousain stadium which has finished far ahead of everyone the regular season and constitutes the perfect candidate to go up the Brennus shield.
Bayonne, present in the last square for the first time in its history and who will have everything to gain on Friday against the reigning champions of France obviously does not see things in this way. And if the rowing could have had everything of the expiatory victim on paper a few weeks ago, this is no longer the case. In any case, according to the captain of the team Arthur Iturria, who wanted Thursday to remind the Toulousains if they had not yet understood that these Basques who discover for the first time the final phase and extended the party by getting rid of Clermont in the barrage have nothing more of the “little” who had drank the cup in the pink city (46-26) last February.
Iturria: “We have nothing to win”
“We have necessarily changed status (…) We cannot say that we are the little thumb,” insists the experienced second international line, who also assures that no one in the Bayonnais camp only considers the season already successful before tackling the Toulouse ogre. “We have not won anything,” insists the former Clermontois, nevertheless aware that rowing, who had created the feat against the Red and Black last November (12-8 victory at home), will not leave with the favors of the forecasts despite his superb and astonishing course. “We are a smaller team than Toulouse, maybe, but I think our place we deserve. Iturria and her family will have the opportunity on Friday to prove it.
