Tipuric: Montpellier win one of Ospreys’ best

The United Rugby Championship (URC) side arrived at the TOP 14 champions’ GGL Stadium as underdogs following their opening-round defeat at Leicester Tigers – their 11th consecutive loss in EPCR’s elite tournament.

But Ospreys produced a phenomenal display to clinch a 21-10 win on Sunday – their first on French soil in the Heineken Champions Cup since 2008 – courtesy of tries from Sam Parry, Kieran Williams and Morgan Morris.

“That result has to be up there among our best in Europe, given we went into the game having not won for such a long time,” flanker Tipuric said.

STATS TEAM OF THE WEEK 📊

Oval have crunched the numbers, here are the #HeinekenChampionsCup R2 top performers...

Can you guess the remaining players? 👀 pic.twitter.com/XvoIBb8BgA

— Heineken Champions Cup (@ChampionsCup) December 19, 2022

“To win is great, but the biggest thing for us now is to carry on winning. We need to become more consistent.

“That’s the standard we want to be playing at week in, week out. We know we can go up another few gears and we want to push on to be better.

“It’s special to put one over on the French champions. You could see they were hurting at the end and they will come to us in the New Year really fired up.”

Ospreys head coach Toby Booth was equally proud of his players’ efforts at Montpellier and revealed that despite the shock triumph, they were frustrated not to have secured the bonus-point try.

“Everyone was bitterly disappointed after last week’s performance. We took it personally and we talked a lot about it,” he said.

“We got the chance to go again and the sign of a good team is that you learn quickly. We learned a lot of lessons out of the Leicester defeat and we proved that.

“But the best part of it was that after the elation on the final whistle, the players were genuinely disappointed that they hadn’t taken more out of the game. It’s nice to have some positivity and to have turned a corner.”