France did not choke against New Zealand but now the Rugby World Cup is theirs to lose
STADE DE FRANCE — Antoine Dupont said Friday was a very long day. We’ve all had long Fridays, but that must have been the longest of his life.
Dupont’s long day ended close to 1am when he walked out of France‘s press conference, unlikely to get to bed much before 2am and who knows how much anyone could sleep after that. He had just led his country to what felt like one of the biggest results in their history, a 27-13 victory over the mighty New Zealand. He had left Stade de France in a state of ecstasy.
“We felt the day was a very long day, a bit like the week has been very long,” Dupont said.
“But when you’re playing at 9pm [it was a 9.15pm kick-off] for a game like this, the day will seem very long, especially when you spend most of your time in your room, trying to be quiet and empty your head because you can’t focus on the game all day.”
The main goal must have been to stop those thoughts of previous French Rugby World Cup nightmares creeping in, the doubts over whether French sides really can deliver in the biggest moments, creeping into the corners of the mind.
So when he and his team-mates walked around the Stade de France after the final whistle, some carrying their small children, some waving to family in the crowd and some just soaking it all in, it was with a sense of relief as much as joy. They had done it. They had not bottled it, even though so many thought they would. The French had been ruthless.
It did initially look like “same old France” when 93 seconds in, Mark Telea touched down Beauden Barrett’s cross-kick. After a 40-minute opening ceremony, which included Dan Carter bringing out the Webb Ellis Cup and a rousing (if disjointed) version of La Marseillaise, the All Blacks burst the bubble within two minutes. What’s the French for “here we go again”?
“It’s true that we didn’t control the game in the first half,” said head coach Fabien Galthie afterwards.
“I think we were a bit taken by the atmosphere, even though we’d prepared for it. We gave the All Blacks an easy score, and we also had a few flaws in the way we tried to execute our strategy which made it seem that the All Blacks were controlling the game better than us.”
But as we have heard so many times before though, this French team is different. They are not mercurial or flighty. They have heft and nouse. They can grind out a win when they need to.
“We improved thanks to our discipline, and we held on, thanks to our discipline, to the score,” Galthie added, words inconceivable for a French coach to say with any credibility just a few years ago.
“There’s always three or four boxes to tick in order to be able to win a game and that’s where today that was essential: discipline.
“We built up a collective confidence for several seasons in different situations over different matches.
“But we always tend to get away with a victory which means that when we start conceding points we don’t have to panic. And it’s our basics today – our defence, our kicking game – that enabled us to stay in the game and then to take over the game.”
France gave away just four penalties all game, while dominance of the scrum and the breakdown drew 12 from the All Blacks.
New Zealand started the tournament as joint-favourites with France, even outright in some places. They are not any more. The bookies were still untrusting of France. They trust now. It is France’s World Cup to lose.
And that is where the problem will lie. Dupont’s complaints about a long day will pale into insignificance over the next seven weeks of hype.
“Mission accomplished” screamed the front page of La Depeche du Midi, a proudly regional newspaper in the south of France. The irony of using the phrase George Bush famously used of the Iraq War, where mission certainly was not accomplished at the time, when the French mission of winning the World Cup is far from accomplished, was seemingly lost on les editeurs in Toulouse.
But let them be excited. This French team have given people something to believe in by beating New Zealand again. Even if politics did divide briefly on Friday – president Emmanuel Macron bravely soldiered on with his pre-match speech despite a sustained chorus of boos – this was a night for all of France to celebrate and unite. Even without winning the World Cup yet, Galthie might think he has succeeded in what he set out to do four years ago.
“When we started building or rebuilding this team, the sense we gave to what we were doing, to why we were doing things, was to unite and share,” the former scrum-half said.
“To unite, organise and share, not just with the French people, not just with the team, but with anyone who wants to follow us.
“So we still have that same vision that goes beyond the rugby in a sense: to unite, organise and share. What we do is play rugby with our hearts, with our values, and, as Antoine also loves saying, [with our] love.”
