Castres 10 Sale Sharks 17

By snaderson
December 13 2015

European away trips are great fun; I've often described them as a great weekend with friends occasionally spoiled by a game of rugby in the middle. Here's snaderson's impressions of the weekend and a good win away in France.

If I had been more professional about my assignment, I wouldn’t have spent all Saturday afternoon drinking in La Cocina with Pete and Ken. However, you act differently, i.e. unadvisedly, on an away trip and I couldn’t resist the 1664 Blonde as served by Sophie, the owner of the aforementioned bar. Looking back now, I dredge up the memories from my metaphorically soggy notebook and find that we won the match – a rare thing for a European away game, and a very welcome one indeed. Other things happened too and the blurry scribbles on that metaphorical notebook somehow resolve themselves into actual events.

It had been a day when plans gently spun off true before wobbling back to right themselves. The bus driver taking us from Carcassonne airport to Castres was on time, in a sense. Unfortunately he was on time for the original flight, not the hour earlier Ryanair had moved us. The same driver kept us waiting again later that evening as a large gang of us stood in the street for an hour expecting to be driven to the match. As people twitched about setting off to walk, the friendly policemen made some calls and let us know that our man was just a few minutes away. His excuse was that he got stuck in the roadworks that were a major feature of the little provincial town. At least it was only cold, not raining, and the ‘son et lumière’ projected on a nearby building provided some distraction.

I would love to give a blow by blow account of the match – how the sides traded points without anyone taking a firm lead, how we threw chances away near the line, how the scrums were more of a lottery than ever – but that page of the notebook is soaked with spilt beer and possibly a bit of the two foot long hotdog that served as my dinner. What I do remember is how no one could quite believe what they were seeing a few minutes from the end when the ref, after consulting the TMO, stuck his hand in the air and jogged to the middle of the posts to give us the winning penalty try. We shouted ourselves hoarse and tutted as the local fans stomped their feet against the stands to set up a deafening din during the kick. At the end, for once, the players came over to wave to us before they whizzed off out of the cold. Our bus back to town, to general delight, was on time. Back to La Cocina, then to the Irish Pub and some time after 2am, with Basque-ing Shark as my final drinking companion, I staggered off to bed.

Castres is quite a pretty place, with its old town centred on Place Jean Jaurès. A Christmas market took up the square, selling the usual bits and bobs, plus a few novel things like woolly slippers and seafood (not on the same stall). The river Agout, spanned by some attractive bridges, runs nearby, past teetering old houses on the Quai des Jacobins. In the other direction is a maze of medieval streets that twist from square to square. Half-timbered houses lean across the gaps, almost touching over your head. Our hotel, the Europe Hôtel, was an old building based around a central courtyard that had been covered over and now housed the reception desk and the stairs to the rooms. Parts of the building were half-timbered and the brickwork was exposed in places to show the construction. The hotel was close to the Place Jean Jaurès, making it easy to pop back now and again (except when you forget to go for your siesta and spend all afternoon in a bar).

The restaurants in the town were high quality. My rabbit dinner (roast leg plus chasseur stew) in Brasserie Europe, the cassoulet and the tartiflette in the Eden, the fabulously fresh prawns in the Christmas market (washed down with Picpoul de Pinet) were all delicious. I have good reports for the seafood at le Tourteau qui Tousse (‘the coughing crab’) as well. But the crowning culinary experience was the supporters’ dinner at the Bistrot des Saveurs. This is a Michelin-starred restaurant run by an ex-pat Geordie (still with a just about perceptible accent). We had five courses of sublime delicacy – a mixture of appetisers, a rich foie gras mousse, tender steak, tasty cheeses, fruity nibbles with the coffee. The cheeses included a tangy Roquefort ice cream (yes, really) and a couple from local producers that the patronne, Marie- Hélène, said didn’t have names because they were just made on the farmhouses. The company was excellent and the time flew by.

With Castres being a small town, you often found yourself bumping into fellow Saleians. And also, with it being a small town, we thought that we had better find somewhere else to spend a day of our time before the flight home. The train to Toulouse naturally had a small contingent of our compatriots and as we walked across the large Place du Capitole we bumped into some others. There was another Christmas market (French mince pies, vin chaud, tartes Basques) and a wander round. We missed the Stade Toulousain club shop, as it’s the most expensive in the world, and so missed out on watching a replay of our match against them from Edgeley Park back in 2010, which was apparently on show there. On the train back, I sat opposite a big bloke in a Castres Olympique jacket. He offered me some of his chocolates and we fell into stilted conversation. My French is terrible but I understood when he described the Top14 in much the same way as our Premiership: it’s a league split between the big spending clubs and the ones who have to just get by (i.e. Castres).

The bus that took us back to Carcassonne airport was on time, as was the final straggler to board (by one minute). I closed my eyes and slept, thinking back over the events of the preceding few days. We had all had a great time in an attractive town. It was fun to share it with the fellow supporters and to share a joke with the friendly locals. But best of all, that rare thing, the European away win. That at least is inked nice and clearly in that metaphorical notebook in my mind.