Toulouse 32 Barrow 22

ONLY in the sport of rugby league could such a much-maligned format for deciding promotion culminate in a final for the ages.

At all levels of the professional game, the current format of various Super Eights, Qualifiers, Shield competitions and play-offs to decide title and promotion issues have faced many questions this year – perhaps no more so than in Kingstone Press League One.

For the outsider, it may seem strange that a Toulouse Olympique side which romped through both the regular season and the Super Eights unbeaten, finishing top of the table in the process, ended up in the four-team play-off for the second promotion spot after losing the championship final to second-placed Rochdale Hornets.

And they may well question how a Barrow Raiders side made up entirely of part-time players can be expected to fly out to France in the small hours on a Saturday morning, play the final and then return home that night – but this still be better than the alternative of travelling via Barcelona as a depleted York City Knights had to do in the previous week’s play-off semi-final. Heck, even those who both play the game and follow it religiously struggle to get their heads around the machinations of the fixture list dreamed up by the RFL’s brains trust deep in the corridors of power at Red Hall.

And yet, despite all of that – and, admittedly, perhaps more by accident than design – the denouement of the League One play-offs produced a contest worthy of a showpiece occasion. Saturday had started ominously for Barrow though, having been sat on the tarmac of Manchester Airport for an hour after their scheduled take-off time due to difficulties in finding anyone to load the team’s baggage into the hold of their specially-chartered plane.

It says much about the spirit head coach Paul Crarey has fostered in his side that they were, on the surface at least, able to shrug off such issues as mere trivialities.

After all, this was a team heading to take on their full-time French counterparts as massive underdogs and with nothing to lose.

Their subsequent late arrival in Toulouse meant the kick-off was put back half-an-hour to 3.30pm local time, although there were few signs this had affected the team when play got under way – particularly as Eze Harper gave the Raiders the lead with an unconverted try after just six minutes.

Sadly for the visitors, this was not a portent of things to come, although at the same time Barrow were hardly overrun by their opponents, save for a four-try blitz at the start of the second half which ultimately proved enough to take the game and their dreams of promotion away from them.

Toulouse may live in the shadow of their rugby union-playing brethren across town, but there was a fervently passionate and partisan crowd to greet them at the Stade des Minimes, complete with brass band, cheerleaders and the riff from Pseudo Echo’s 1985 hit Funky Town bursting over the PA system during breaks in play.

Those Barrow fans who had made the trip were determined to make themselves heard as well though and they were able to silence the home crowd when Harper went over in the corner, having been picked out with a cut-out pass by Ryan Fieldhouse following some hard running from forwards Liam Harrison and Joe Bullock.

It was not just the pack who were taking the fight – literally, the case of Anthony Bate throwing a punch in an incident which referee Gareth Hewer saw fit to place on report – to Toulouse though, with the backs also throwing themselves into challenges with scant regard for their bodies as the home side struggled to find a way to the line.

But at Sylvain Houles’ men started to gain a foothold, so the pressure and high-intensity defence led to penalties being given away, resulting in Dan Toal and then Ryan Fieldhouse being sin-binned in quick succession following team warnings for repeated high tackles and time-wasting respectively.

Injuries to Toal, Max Wiper and Nathan Mossop, who suffered a dislocated ankle, did not help their cause either, but even with Barrow temporarily down to 11 men, Toulouse only managed to breach their line once and it was from a moment of magic at the end of the first half when Tony Maurel darted through the defence from inside his own half, with Mark Kheirallah’s conversion give his side a two-point lead at the interval.

But when Gavin Marguerite finished off a swift attack involving Maurel and Kheirallah eight minutes into the second half, it paved the way for Toulouse to seize control with three further converted scores.

Skipper Sebastian Planas ploughed his way through, swiftly followed by Kuni Minga acrobatically diving over in the corner and then Kheirallah catching the defence off-guard from a 20-metre tap restart and sprinting clear to score.

Again though, Barrow’s inner resolve came to the fore, with Chris Fleming and Ryan Fieldhouse both finishing off devastating moves with converted tries. Kheirallah settled some jangling nerves with a penalty, only for Fleming to go over again inside the final two minutes and Hankinson to convert, but there was to be no fairy-tale ending.

So it was that Toulouse had, eventually, earned promotion to the Championship. Barrow will have to wait at least another year to get back to the second tier, but after the season they have enjoyed, few would bet against them being in contention to do just that.

Toulouse Olympique: Mark Kheirallah; Tony Maurel, Gavin Marguerite, Gregory White, Kuni Minga; Johnathon Ford, Danny Hulme; Clement Boyer, Kane Bentley, Bastien Canet, Sebastien Planas, Rhys Curran, Anthony Marion. Interchange: Mourad Kriouache, Samy Masselot, Tyla Hepi, Constantine Mika.

Barrow Raiders: Ryan Fieldhouse 7; Eze Harper 8, Cameron Pitman 7, Max Wiper 8, Chris Fleming 8; Chris Hankinson 7, Jamie Dallimore 9; Joe Bullock 8, Karl Ashall 8, Oliver Wilkes 8, Liam Harrison 8, Danny Morrow 8, Martin Aspinwall 8. Interchange: Nathan Mossop 8, Dan Toal 7, Andrew Dawson 8, Anthony Bate 8. Referee: Gareth Hewer. Sin-bin: Barrow Raiders: Toal (33-43, high tackle), Fieldhouse (38-48, time wasting).

Scoring: 6 – Harper try (0-4); 39 – Maurel try, Kheirallah con (6-4); 48 – Marguerite try, Kheirallah con (12-4); 51 – Planas try, Kheirallah con (18-4); 55 – Minga try, Kheirallah con (24-4); 60 – Kheirallah try and con (30-4); 69 – Fleming try, Hankinson con (30-10); 73 – Fieldhouse try, Hankinson con (30-16); 76 – Kheirallah pen (32-16); 79 – Fleming try, Hankinson con (32-22).

Raiders star man: Jamie Dallimore. An absolute man-mountain in defence and dangerous in attack whether with the ball in hand or his intelligent kicking, the scrum-half personified the spirit, drive and determination shown by the Raiders in this game.