Turmoil In Toulon: French Rugby's Greatest Soap Opera

Three weeks into the Top 14 season and there is already talk of a big team sacking their coach, writes James Harrington.

ATTENTION! Urgence! Au secours! (as they say in France). The Top 14 is not going according to plan.

After three rounds the relative paupers Brive and La Rochelle occupy the top two slots, while star-studded moneybags sides Toulon, Montpellier and Bordeaux languish in 11th, 12th and 13th places.

Thankfully Racing 92, Clermont and Toulouse are keeping the flag flying for the league’s elite.

The early pace-setters deserve their lofty positions. La Rochelle followed their first away win in 518 days with a second victory on the road just seven days later.

Brive, meanwhile, duked their way to a first win in a decade at Toulon’s Stade Mayol. That win was again courtesy of the howitzer boot of fullback Gaetan Germain, and the collective headless chicken impression from Toulon – with the honourable exception of Gaetan’s opposite number Leigh Halfpenny, who salvaged some club pride with another perfect penalty-tee performance.

Just three games into the new season, the word ‘crisis’ can clearly be heard in the corridors of power at the Top 14 soap opera club Toulon.

The fact is head coach Diego Dominguez, who took over from Bernard Laporte this summer, seems to be on borrowed time – just three competitive matches into a job it was always doubtful he was actually ready for.

Club President Mourad Boudjellal told a press conference after the Brive defeat that he was at the ‘limits of his patience’ with a side that boasts 800 international caps but could not win at home.

Dominguez, he said, has ‘one last chance’ to prove he’s the man for the big chair. That last chance is at Toulouse – who have had the measure of Toulon in recent meetings.

The magnanimous Boudjellal, at least, said they do not have to win. But he is looking for a much better performance.

Unfortunately for Dominguez, Toulon’s Top 14 fixture list does not get any easier after the Toulouse game. The following week they’re at Racing 92. Then there’s Clermont and Montpellier at home, and finally a visit to La Rochelle before the European Champions Cup kicks off in October. That starts with the visit of reigning champions Saracens.

There was a collective ‘huh?’ when, at the start of the 2015/16 season, Boudjellal revealed Dominguez would eventually replace Laporte as head coach.

There’s no denying Dominguez’s playing credentials. The Argentina-born Italian international is one of only five players to have scored more than 1,000 Test points. He played in three World Cups, and was the mainstay of the Italian side in the early years of the Six Nations. At club level, he won the French championship in 1998 with Stade Francais.

But he arrived at Toulon with precisely no coaching experience. The idea, Boudjellal said, was for him to develop his nascent coaching skills under the guidance of Laporte before taking sole charge of a squad of highly paid egos.

Really.

Rumours that it was not going according to plan quickly surfaced. Dominguez was supposed to take over in January 2016. But Laporte stuck around until the end of a trophyless season amid reports that his successor was – unaccountably – not ready.

Then ex-Montpellier coach Fabien Galthie said he’d been speaking to Toulon about taking over the big chair, despite the fact that, due to convoluted and frankly weird French bureaucracy, he is still technically on the books at Montpellier, even though he got the push there in November 2014.

Regardless of what happens with Dominguez, Galthie is out of the reckoning until at least November, when an employment tribunal is set to rule on various aspects of his dismissal.

Back in Toulon, there followed a spat over the arrival of forwards coach Marc Del Maso at the start of pre-season training. Dominguez reportedly wanted to appoint his own backroom team, but Boudjellal went ahead and gave Del Maso the key job and presented his head coach with a fait accompli.

Now, it appears the former France hooker and his predecessor Jacques Delmas – who is still at Toulon but whose responsibilities have been reduced to coaching lineouts and a pitchside shouting role – are not playing nicely.

Another recent appointment, defence coach Grant Doorey, has reportedly been shown the door after little more than a month at the club.

Stick around, keep watching. The Toulon soap opera will continue. And don’t be surprised if Boudjellal decides he’s the man to coach the team – after all a fortune made from comic books and graphic novels is the perfect training for a Top 14 club coach, right?