COMIC BOOK heroes are more accustomed to saving the good citizens of Metropolis and Gotham City but they took time out from their day jobs recently to rescue instead a fallen giant of French rugby. Mourad Boudjellal has spent many millions of euros on making Rugby Toulonais one of biggest clubs in Europe and the president owes his fortune to rocketing sales of hardback comic books that are the mainstay of his expanding publishing company. Kerpow!
Born to Algerian immigrants, Boudjellal took control of Toulon Rugby Club immediately after the club's relegation into the French D2 (second division) in 2006. With no salary cap in operation, the president has rewritten the rules on club rugby large
sse in much the same way that Roman Abramovich ripped things up when he took over Chelsea.
Boudjellal brought in the former All Blacks skipper Tana Umaga, originally as a player and then as a coach. He signed Victor Matfield and only narrowly failed to add his Springbok partner Bakkies Botha. Andrew Mehrtens partnered George Gregan at halfback, boasting 209 international appearances between them. England flyer Dan Luger was to be found on one wing and Anton Oliver was in the front row.
Toulon has been turned into a multinational, exotic and costly dream team and at the very epicentre of this dazzling array of rugby talent there stands the club's longest-serving player, a Stirling-born hooker with an Irish name in the middle of a French rugby revolution. Phil Fitzgerald has been pretty much ever-present in the Toulon front row ever since his first appearance as a callow and somewhat nervous youth way back in 1997.
"In my very first game for the club," Fitzgerald recalls, "the forwards sat down beforehand and everyone agreed that if their hooker attempted to strike on our ball the second row was to slip his binding and punch him. It was pretty different to what I was used to."
Fitzgerald was a product of Dollar Academy. He spent one year in the same Watsonians side as Stuart Grimes, Jason White, Tom Smith and Cammy Mather before his college course required him to spend an exchange year in France. He pitched up at Toulon and, although he returned to Scotland to spend a year with Boroughmuir, the die had been cast. Fitzgerald moved permanently to France when he graduated and he has been there ever since.
"I did have a lot of people telling me not to go to France and, at the time, it was a difficult decision," he says. "I missed out on playing for Scotland Under-21s – I had already played for them the previous year – and I think that Watsonians won the league that year so I missed out twice over."
Arguably his move abroad also ruled him out of the reckoning at full international level, remember all those years when Gordon Bulloch was unchallenged, although Fitzgerald insists that he still hasn't given up hope of a call from Frank Hadden. "I just have to try and get as many starts for Toulon as I can and hope I get noticed," he says.
"I have no regrets at all. I have really enjoyed my time here. When all the big names arrived I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. Here were all these players that I was used to seeing on TV and I was playing alongside them. I just said to myself that, whatever happens, I have to make sure that I make the most of this and I think I have done that."
While Toulon have jettisoned several of the big signings who gained them promotion to the Top 14, they haven't entirely lost their appetite for the big hitters and bad boys of world rugby. Former All Black enforcer Jerry Collins is teaming up with Springbok Joe Van Niekerk in the third row of the scrum. In the backs, one-time Wallaby scrumhalf Matt Henjak is in place after leaving the Brumbies under a cloud for breaking a colleague's jaw in a fight, and further out is arguably the most reviled man in Australia, Sonny Bill Williams. The former rugby league player went one worse than Cristiano Ronaldo last summer and actually walked out on the Canterbury Bulldogs mid-season with four-and-a-bit years of a five-year contract still to run.
The current Toulon squad is about half French with the other half a disparate mix of united nations, which at least that makes life a little easier on Fitzgerald, who has had dual roles to fill. "I am sort of unofficial translator for the forward coach (former French prop Jean-Jacques Crenca] and thankfully there is a little less English spoken these days," he says.
In fact his twin duties as hooker and translator are supplemented by a third role – more often than not Fitzgerald skippers the Toulon team. This is testament not only to his age and experience– he is now 31 and speaks French better than he does English – but also to his excellence. Even when Anton Oliver arrived at the club last season the All Black had to share the No.2 shirt with his Scottish rival.
Fitzgerald has started two of the three matches this season, coming on as a substitute in the third as Toulon have got off to a decent start. But whatever influence Fitzgerald has at the club – and as one of the few links with the club's past the hooker is at the centre of things – he is quick to point to Umaga as the main driving force.
"The president has the money and is in a position to make all the decisions but Tana has been the biggest influence on the club. He is someone who just commands respect.
"He adopts a different approach to most French coaches, everything is very positive which is refreshing. He is massively charismatic and that helps gel everyone together. He avoids too much emotion and instead he is very pragmatic, simply stating what we have to do to win.
"In the first game of the season we were losing 13-0 to Clermont at half time and he didn't shout in the dressing room but he was very calm. He just said that we had to get our hands on the ball and that we could still win. It was a relief not to get a bollocking."
Umanga's words did the trick and Toulon ran out 22-16 winners.
But even Umanga's diplomacy was stretched to breaking point last season when the Toulon team of superstars were a magnet for all the wrong sort of attention. The big-named players, allied to some weak refereeing, brought out the thuggery that simmers just below the surface of French club rugby.
Things came to a head in one match against Pau which has fast become a Youtube favourite. A huge free-for-all erupted after one Toulon player reacted badly to being illegally dragged out of a maul. I put it to Fitzgerald that, while the footage is not crystal clear, it looks suspiciously like the feisty little Scot who kicked off the biggest rammy of the season.
"That was the straw that broke the camel's back", he replies conceding the point. "Because we had some big names in our team we were, what's the word, ambushed in every town we played. It was getting ridiculous. Just minutes before that incident I had been punched five times right in front of the touch judge who did nothing.
"It was organised thuggery but in a funny sort of way that match brought what had been happening to the attention of the referees and that was pretty much the end of it."
Toulon started the second half with 12 men after one red card and two yellow. Even Umaga was sent from the field; his crime was handing out water bottles and trying to calm his infuriated players.
"I learnt my lesson with that ban," says a contrite Fitzgerald, "sometimes you just have to take it on the chin"; a particularly apt sentiment for someone who has spent their career in French club rugby. Whack!
Other Scots in FranceSCOTT MURRAY (Montauban)
CHRIS CUSITER (Perpignan)
NATHAN HINES (Perpignan)
SIMON TAYLOR (Stade Francais)
PHIL FITZGERALD (Toulon)
CRAIG SMITH (Racing Metro)
MARCUS DI ROLLO (Toulouse)
The full article contains 1414 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
