“I’m not going to change everything with the wave of a magic wand,” warned Montpellier’s new manager Patrice Collazo at a press conference on Thursday, inducted on Sunday at the head of the Hérault team, last after seven days of Top 14. “I don’t pretend to solve everything at once,” said Collazo before the Oyonnax reception on Saturday, but “we want to show the players that we have mastered certain essential things to give them trust and guidance.

“We know these players who were French champions less than two years ago. You don’t become bad overnight. (…) If we didn’t have confidence in them, we wouldn’t have gotten on the train,” added the technician who arrived in Montpellier to replace the Englishman Richard Cockerill at the head of a team defeated in six of the first seven days of Top 14. However, the new Hérault manager is “not worried”.

“We’re going to try to put it all together, because we have the impression that the team is (cut) in two. To have a collective commitment, you need an individual commitment. For the moment, there is restraint among certain players,” he regretted. After leaving Brive (Pro D2) a few weeks ago, Patrice Collazo joined the MHR on Sunday, just like Bernard Laporte, who became the new rugby director of the Hérault club.

“His role was to instill awareness in the players,” explained Collazo about the former president of the FFR, because “if we flee reality we will plaster ourselves into the wall”. But the roles are well defined: “We won’t see him with a tracksuit eh (smile). His position is very clear, he is a facilitator.”

The Varois also chased away any controversy over his reunion with fly-half Louis Carbonel, with whom relations had been strained when the first coached the second in Toulon two years ago. “When you are a coach, you have to be pragmatic. There is no debate about Louis’ level. I’m not going to talk about its quality, because that would be indecent. When I trained him in Toulon, I didn’t make him play because he’s from Toulon, or because his dad was at the club. He played because he was good,” Collazo said.