Alexandre LAPANDRY

Biog of Alexandre LAPANDRY :

For Alexandre Lapandry the 2009-2010 season was remarkable: becoming an international at 20 years and 3 months old, winning a Grand Slam before he was even 21, and a French championship two months later. But it was merely the continuation of a rise to prominence that had begun a year earlier with his promotion to the first team at Clermont, and the preceding years playing in his native Saône and Loire region, at Creusot, at the rugby centre at Dijon (where he met Morgan Parra) and then at the National Rugby Centre at Marcoussis where he was training when he first signed for ASM (2007-2008).

“He has massive potential that can only grow,” stated Marc Lièvremont on the occasion of the young flanker's first cap. Vern Cotter, Clermont's Kiwi coach, who thinks no less of him, asked the French staff to rest Lapandry for the summer of 2010 so that the player, who always shows total commitment, might build up his shoulder strength. Lapandry’s body takes a pounding from all the tackling he does, regularly obtaining his team's highest tackle count and most of the time with 100% efficiency.

The youthful Lapandry, growing up under the wing of a number of experienced Clermont players – Audebert (only 2 caps but 11 years at ASM and five Top 14 finals), Bonnaire (56 caps, three finals) and White (77 caps for Scotland, one English Championship, 2006) - had strung together a 2008-2009 season in which he discovered the Top 14 and the European Cup, missed out on the play-offs in the French Championship with Clermont but led the France Under 20s as captain to the World Cup in Japan, and the 2009-2010 season that saw him establish himself little by little as the Auvergne club's starting flanker at the same time as he became a fully-fledged international, without stopping for a breath.

Lièvremont first named Lapandry in the starting line-up for the match against Samoa in November 2009 (at the same time as another debutant from his generation, Benjamin Fall). Later, Lapandry replaced Fulgence Ouedraogo, injured, in the 2010 Six Nations tournament. Taking it all in his stride, Lapandry declared at the time, “It’s harder to take the step up from the Top 14 to the European Cup than from the European Cup to the Six Nations.” So he played, without pressure, in three rounds of the 2010 Grand Slam (scoring a try against Italy) before finishing the season in style, appearing in the starting line-up at number seven for ASM’s first French Championship title after almost one hundred years of waiting.

Lapandry was named in Lièvremont’s thirty-man squad for the November 2010 tests after his summer hiatus but only played in the match against Fiji, demonstrating just how strong the competition is in les Bleus' back row. But he is young and the future belongs to him.