Winless French rugby club on verge of unwanted sporting immortality – Telegraph.co.uk

It was a long time coming, but all bad things come to an end. The streak is over. Last Saturday, Worcester Warriors finally won a Premiership match.

By beating London Irish 36-24 at Sixways, Worcester ended a run of 18 straight league defeats, a sequence stretching back to the corresponding fixture last November. Amateurs. With the Premiership ringfenced now and for the foreseeable future, Worcester had the opportunity to do something incredible and set a losing run to last for the ages, but they threw it all away. And for what? To finish 10th or 11th when history was within their grasp? Pathetic.

If you want to see how it is really done then you should look over the Channel to Agen, the losers losers. According to some stats meticulously researched by (and shamelessly stolen from) my Francophile colleague, Charles Richardson, Agen's wait for the saccharine taste of a league victory will have stretched to 583 days by the time they play Mont de Marsan in ProD2, French rugbys second tier, on Saturday. For context, when they won won 30-16 away to Brive on February 22 2020, Covid-19 was firmly lodged in the foreign news section of the papers. Apparently there were fears that it could hit Primark and Asos supply chains. Thankfully nothing more came to pass...

But theres more. Their wait for a home league victory goes back even farther 700 plus days to October 19 2019 when Stade Francais were thumped 27-19, at which point most people would have thought the Wuhan lab was a hip-hop tribute group. It is quite remarkable to trace their form over this near two-year period. They start the Top 14 season strongly. At the start of the 2019-20 season, they beat Brive and moneybags Montpellier, draw away at Racing 92 and claim a number of bonus points. At which point, not only do the wheels start to come off, but the whole vehicle goes through the central reservation and bursts into flames.

Yet, despite this downward spiral, Agen were saved from relegation, with the pandemic curtailing the 2019-20 campaign. Once sport resumed in France, their trajectory continued in a vertical descent. The final standings read: played 26, lost 26, scored 315, conceded 1101. The only blot on their copybook was two losing bonus points, which prevented from gaining a big fat zero in the points column, but still set all manner of ignominious Top 14 records (although it was still one point more than London Welshs 2014-15 Premiership campaign).

Relegation can often allow clubs to press the regroup and reset. Reconstruction work at their Stade Armandie began over the summer which provided a decent enough metaphor. However, their new campaign began in the exact same manner the last as finished. Four games, four defeats, including to newly promoted Bourg-en-Bresse. To make matters worse, Saturdays opponents Mont de Marsan are top of the table.

Located in Frances south-west rugby heartland, Agen have a proud history. They have won the French league eight times and reached the final as recently as 2002. French icon Philippe Sella represented them for 13 years.

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Winless French rugby club on verge of unwanted sporting immortality - Telegraph.co.uk