Mêlée, potle, pédale.

Thursday 5th October 2023. Lyon.

I thought I would translate Scrum, Pootle and Pedal into French and see what it was…hence the title of todays belated blog. I may try some more translations….

Our challenge for the day was to work out how to get to the Lyon Stadium and back for the match. Getting back after 11pm was the tricky bit but it was all rather a challenge to be honest.

We bought some one hour travel tickets for the Lyon Transport System and caught a bus part way and took the Metro train into Parc de Bellecour. At Bellecour we visited the ‘Rugby Village’ that had shops, bars and novelty rugby games….but no big screen for watching.

We got advice about how to get to the stadium later by catching another Metro and a Shuttle Tram….so far so good.

We got on with the sightseeing on a gloriously pleasant day.

We had visited the Roman Theatre and Odeon too.

We enjoyed the Vieux Ville (Old Town) with its narrow alleys and joining passages between tenements.

We have the river Rhône and Saône in the same city.

Later afternoon we started towards the Stadium and arrived 3 hours before the match. We had a drink and a pizza and then entered with what appeared like mainly New Zealand fans. Guessing who was who in the crowd was difficult because there were plenty of New Zealanders but many people wearing All Blacks clothes were actually French and many were from elsewhere…Switzerland, Germany and elsewhere. There were a few Uruguayan fans too but again quite a few were French. We did also see some Irish and Welsh fans and a couple of English.

There was no risk of The All Blacks losing. The ‘Hakka’ is always worth a watch and then for the first 20 minutes it was still 0-0. In that time there had been three disallowed ‘essai’ (tries), one was a Uruguay disallowed try! The game ended 73-0, so it was a bit of a ‘poussez sur’ (push over)!

We left a little early to avoid the crush and to cope with our journey. It was a tram ride, two metro trains and a bus ride to get back. We were fortunate in a way because the last bus had gone and we had to get another metro to another station to get the last No3 bus to our site….and we had to run the last 20 metres to get that bus! We were back to the van just after midnight…..phew, we were weary and ready for bed.