Two minutes from the end, on a new try from Congolese winger Madosh Tambwe after a wild race, Bordeaux crunched the LOU (32-25) and qualified for the semi-finals in San Sebastián in Spain where the Girondin club will face La Rochelle next Saturday (5 p.m.). In their den of Gerland, Les Lyonnais proved to be a bit too friable this Sunday evening in an overexcited atmosphere.
After the thunderstorms the night before, there wasn’t much electricity left in the air. She was on the lawn, in the legs and the intentions of players who, on each side, saw the prospect of a semi-final as revenge for an ups and downs season. The meeting started at a frantic pace. The Bordealis took the lead on an initiative by Matthieu Jalibert. The opener infiltrated a mouse hole, seemed a bit short to flatten, even losing control of the ball but the referee, who could not benefit from the video this Sunday evening due to technical problems ( in-goal judges were mobilized for the occasion), chose to give the try (6th).
The response was quick. Baptiste Couilloud, the scrum half of LOU who has sounded all the revolts for a month to win a qualification in the final phase despite serious dissension between the workforce and his manager Xavier Garbajosa, arose at the level of a regrouping. His acceleration froze the Bordeaux defense. His straight pass for his winger Ethan Dumortier was decisive (9th).
Dominated in conquest, especially in closed melee, the Bordelais also suffered devastating counterattacks. Josua Tuisova, the center who will evolve next season at Racing, qualified the day before for the semi-finals thanks to his success against Stade Français (33-20), showed that he had ants in his legs. Author of a fifty-meter breakthrough found his winger Verdamu with a fifteen-meter pass at full speed. At the end of the action, it was still him who punctured the last Bordeaux curtain (30th). At halftime, Lyon leads by 9 points (17-8). Nothing definitive especially as on the return from the locker room, the two teams started again at a hundred miles an hour in an unbridled and breathless match. The Bordeaux scrum-half Maxime Lucu, understudy of Antoine Dupont within the XV of France, came out of his box in turn. His breakthrough resulted, at the end of the action, in the test of the 3rd line Diaby (47th).
After a few exchanges of ping-pong, ball in hand, and despite their numerical inferiority at 13 against 14 according to the yellow cards, the Bordelais found the fault on a solitary raid by the Congolese winger Madosh Tambwe, slaloming in a dumbfounded Lyon defense (67th).
In the process, Lucu converted a penalty from 50 meters to take an option ten minutes from the end (20-25). But it was said that this match would be played on a wire. The force test from the center of LOU Maraku reset the counters to zero (25-25, 74th) just before Tambwe, again he flattened after a forty-meter race. Test granted, transformation of Jalibert. Bordeaux snatched victory two minutes from the end.
Dots
Lyon: 3 tries from Dumortier (9th), Tuisova (30th), Maraku (74th), 2 conversions from Sopoaga (9th, 30th), 2 penalties from Sopoaga (40th, 58th)
Bordeaux-Bègles: 4 tries by Jalibert (6th), Diaby (47th), Tambwe (67th, 78th), 3 conversions by Jalibert (47th, 67th, 78th), 2 penalties by Jalibert (24th), Lucu (69th)
