The weakness of Fabio Aru’s Astana team cost the Italian the yellow jersey here on Saturday, allowing Chris Froome to regain the race lead. When the remnants of the peloton fractured in the final 500 metres Aru was poorly placed at the back of the group and, while Froome finished seventh behind the stage winner, Michael Matthews of Australia, the Italian lost 25sec in the final 500m to cede the race lead by 19sec.

Tour de France: Chris Froome back in yellow as Michael Matthews wins stage 14 – live! Read more

“If you’d said to me this morning I would take 25sec from Aru on this finish, I wouldn’t have believed you,” Froome said. “We knew the finish would be selective but I didn’t expect to be taking these margins off some of the contenders. It was very technical; it was important to be at the front. I didn’t know where Fabio was but my team-mate Michal Kwiatkowski was shouting at me to go because there were big gaps everywhere.”

The Sky leader also gained a handful of seconds on rivals such as Romain Bardet, Simon Yates and Nairo Quintana, as well as on his team-mate Mikel Landa. The overall standings remain finely poised, with 29sec separating the first four of Froome, Aru, Bardet and Rigoberto Uran.

“It was important to come to the climb without having made any big efforts; it was a very technical finish with lots of road furniture, it was important to be at the front taking perfect lines,” Froome added. “It’s still so close at the top. I have to regard all of the riders within a minute as a threat. At this point we are fighting for every second.”

Astana are without their two strongest riders in the crash victims Dario Cataldo and Jakob Fuglsang and had been conspicuous by their absence during Friday’s Pyrenean stage, when Aru was left to fend for himself for 80 kilometres. As the peloton descended into Rodez the yellow jersey was at the back of the string, whereas Froome was prominent at the front; Aru had not a single team-mate close by to help him regain position at the front and had to close gaps on his own as the race split.

With vital energy burned up it was virtually inevitable that he would relinquish the race lead. This might not have been entirely a bad thing for the Italian, given that Astana’s game plan hangs on being able to base their race on Froome, so his team manager Giuseppe Martinelli told The Observer. “If Sky ride only for Froome and keep Landa back, that’s good for us; we can base our race on Froome. If they keep two plates spinning – Froome and Landa – it gets complicated,” Martinelli said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Australia’s Michael Matthews celebrates as he crosses the finish line ahead of Belgium’s Thomas de Gendt. Photograph: Christophe Ena/AP

The sprint for the finish was intense, fought out between the winner here in 2015, Greg van Avermaet, and Matthews, who had targeted this stage, and was able to regain valuable ground in his battle for the green points jersey with Marcel Kittel, who could not hang on when the pace increased 45 kilometres out.

Matthews came round the Olympic champion Van Avermaet with 60m remaining and had a clear margin by the line. It was just reward for a stage in which his Sunweb team had – together with Van Avermaet’s BMC – kept tabs on a dangerous five-man escape, to take their second stage win in two days after Friday’s for the Australian’s room-mate Warren Barguil.

The standings could be reshuffled as early as Sunday, which includes two first-category climbs, one close to the start and one near the finish. In between, the roads of the Lozère and Haute Loire are brutally tough, as Miguel Indurain found out in 1995 when Laurent Jalabert and the ONCE team came close to costing him his fifth Tour on the road to Mende, not far away. “It will be war, a full-on stage with lots of attacks; it will be all hands on deck,” said Froome.

The tightness of the standings makes for intrigue all round, to start with the question of whether Landa has “left the reservation,” as one rival team manager put it. No one can be absolutely certain of the depth of the Spaniard’s loyalty to Froome and Sky, as he is out of contract in a few months and has been linked to Quintana’s Movistar. Similarly Aru is rumoured to be leaving Astana for another Italian-run team, UAE. It was coincidence no doubt but, when Aru was without team help on Friday, UAE were pulling at the front of his group.

By way of a little recent history looking ahead to this week’s two massive Alpine stages and the time trial in Marseille, this year’s Giro d’Italia went into its final time-trial stage with six riders bracketed by 90 seconds, the tightest finish in its history. With a week to go there the thinking was that a series of tough mountain stages would split the leaders but it never happened. A knockout punch might well come on the Col du Galibier or the Col d’Izoard – there can hardly be more propitious terrain – but nothing in the race so far suggests it is inevitable or even likely.