Vannes led Toulouse 13-0 and left with nothing

Some defeats feel like a promise, and others leave an empty column. This one did both at once.

Thirteen points up in twenty-one minutes

The promoted side did not approach this game as extras. Maxime Lafage opened the scoring with a penalty in the third minute, Eric Marks scored in the seventh, conversion included, and Anthony Bouthier added a drop goal in the twenty-first. Twenty-one minutes played, a thirteen-point lead over the four-time French champions, and thirty thousand people in a Ligue 1 football stadium.

That drop goal is worth pausing on, because it was the first of the season in the Top 14. There had been eight in the whole of last season, and none since the restart before this one.

Seventeen Toulouse points in fourteen minutes

Toulouse took twenty-five minutes to get going, then fourteen to turn the match around. Paul Graou scored in the twenty-fifth, Santiago Chocobares in the thirty-fifth, with Romain Ntamack converting both before adding a penalty in the thirty-ninth.

Between the twenty-fifth and the thirty-ninth minute, the champions scored seventeen points while Vannes managed only three, and the score went from 13-0 to the Bretons to 16-17 to the visitors. All that while playing with fourteen men at the end of the spell, Cyril Baille having been sin-binned in the thirty-third.

One point in it at the fiftieth, six at the end

The second half at first seemed to confirm the shift, with Teddy Thomas’s converted try in the forty-eighth taking the gap to eight points. But Ben Stevenson replied two minutes later, Lafage converted, and Vannes were back within one, 23-24.

The same Stevenson was then sin-binned in the fifty-ninth, and Blair Kinghorn finished it off in the seventy-first to seal the score at 23-29. A six-point margin, one too many for the losing bonus point, which stops at five.

The only Top 14 club without a single point

That is where the evening becomes hard to look at in the table. After three rounds, Vannes are the only club in the league yet to take a point, with three defeats against Castres 29-20, Montpellier 12-26 and Toulouse 23-29.

The comparison with Toulon shows what that costs. Toulon have also lost all three of their games, but by one, one and two points, which earned them three losing bonus points and thirteenth place. Vannes lost by nine, fourteen and six, and have nothing. One point closer on Saturday, and the promoted side would have been level with Toulon.

The fixture list does not get any easier straight away, but the level of performance has moved up a notch between the first round and this one.