It is the matchday bus rides to his new club’s stadium that, for Will Collier, perfectly capture the parallel universe of French club rugby. “You can hear the fans when you’re still a minute away,” says the former Harlequins prop, one of the latest band of Premiership pros to relocate to the Top 14, in his case to Castres. “You can see the smoke and the flares going off. There are drums and trumpeters … they even had a saxophonist last week. It’s absolutely bonkers. The passion is wild.”
Welcome to a different world. Castres, about 50 miles from Toulouse, is a modest-sized town of 50,000-odd people but rugby fever is rampant. “When we played Toulouse at home in October there were people crying in the pre-game guard of honour. It meant that much to them.” Despite the fact Collier played 240 first-team matches for Quins, last weekend’s atmosphere at Clermont’s Stade Marcel-Michelin also made the 33-year-old shake his experienced head. “I came back on following a yellow card and they were baying for blood. It was like they were at some kind of dogfight. It was a real cauldron … the energy from the crowd was unbelievable.”
Collier is far from the only former Premiership hired gun enjoying his change of scene. He, his wife, Kate, and their two young boys, Charlie and Freddie, enjoy meeting up on their days off with Jack Willis and his family, based in Toulouse. Former teammates such as Joe Marchant and Kyle Sinckler are at Stade Français and Toulon respectively while loads more exiled English internationals are scattered the length and breadth of France. Owen Farrell, Courtney Lawes, Mako and Billy Vunipola, Manu Tuilagi, Jack Nowell, Lewis Ludlam, David Ribbans, Sam Simmonds, Dan Robson, Kieran Brookes, Jack Maunder: the list is lengthy.
Which prompts the million-euro question, as this season’s Champions Cup commences: does the Rugby Football Union need to get with the beat and stop seeing all this as some kind of existential threat to the English game?
Might it not be good news in terms of broadening minds and developing character? And, perhaps, is this a timely moment to re-examine the rule decreeing that only players based in England are eligible for the national team?
That particular debate, from Collier’s perspective, is rapidly becoming a no-brainer.
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