Former France international Benjamin Kayser has revealed the gruesome, machete-slashing chaos that erupted on Jonathan Davies' first night out as a Clermont Auvergne player.
After starring for the British and Irish Lions on their winning tour of Australia in 2013, 'Foxy' secured a big-money move to French outfit Clermont.
The pair featured on a new episode of The Good, The Bad and The Rugby with James Haskell, where 37-cap Kayser unravelled the tale of Davies' first social to the jaw-dropping shock of presenter Haskell.
The former front-rower said: "We actually had a fantastic night, to be totally honest! Originally. 99% of it was sensational. We went from bar to bar, with all the new boys who were strapped up. He [Davies] remembers half of it, but he did well. And then we went to the last final nightclub. I mean Millau is a big village. There's one nightclub where everybody meets around.
"A guy slaps a girl in the middle of the nightclub, Aurelien Rougerie grabs his hands like, 'mate, you do this again and I'll kick the living s**t out of you.'
"Things are about to kick off and the boys realise it's 45 of us. There's not just... well, 44 of us [points to Davies], because he was dead! All of a sudden they back out, but they wait for us on scooters in front of the nightclub and we hear later that they are the local drug dealers or whatever it is.
"But it's 40 of us. So they're on the scooters looking a bit threatening. Some of the boys are about to go, Rougerie grabs us and is like, 'let's not f**k this night up. It's been fantastic. Let's just walk home.'
"It starts p***ing down with rain, there's always a guy who's going to be drunk and needs to be picked up. There's a guy who stops for a fag, there's a guy who stops to chat to somebody. So you know how you become little groups of twos and threes everywhere? I'm carrying John Ulugia, the hooker who was very, very drunk with Aurelien Rougerie.
"As we were walking up, we just see guys coming up with scooters, with things in their hands. And it's p***ing down, we don't really know what's happening. And it's those boys, they came back. But they had machetes, shovels, and you know in front of boulangeries you have like an advertisement thing? Well they'd picked them up as shields. Then it was three minutes, two and a half minutes of just craziness. We beat the s**t out of them then. But they're cutting and that's why we've got cuts everywhere."
Kayser points to two large scars on his bicep from the ordeal.
"Four weeks before, I had a double operation of my neck, and I got hit by a shovel on my neck. So they were testing, you know! Julien Pierre rocked up to come and save us, was about to swing on the first guy and got hit with a machete on his hip. 44 stitches he had. He was open from his bellybutton all the way to his back. This close (pinches fingers) to snapping his sciatic nerve. So that means no more leg power."
Davies interjected: "Hell of a scar."
Kayser added: "The craziness about this all is that actually, 45 guys, but only five actually got to fight against 12 of them because they went with backup. All the big players that we had, the Jamie Cudmore, he would have killed somebody, the Georgians...
"Jon Fox," quipped Davies.
Kayser went on: " All they saw was a guy running down the street with a shovel. I'm going to finish on a cute note. We got to the hotel and all the big fellas are like, 'right, we need to go and get them'. So they were breaking chairs, making weapons and all the Georgians are like, 'we're going on a manhunt'. They were back and it was World War Two, and they're walking down the streets and at one point they hear this old lady from a window, 'down there! Down there, there's a weird individual!'
"They go, 'right, it's one of them!' Then they start running, they get there. Do you know who it is? John Ulugia, who I dropped as the fight kicked off, who was so drunk, who had seen nothing of what happened, who was just there still sleeping. In the end they got picked up by the police the next day."
Davies explained: "My mother was like, 'you're coming home. You're not staying in France!'"
'Foxy' would spend two years at Clermont before returning to hometown club Scarlets in 2016. Kayser spent eight years with the club before retiring in 2019.
You can watch the full clip below:
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