There could be a blizzard of broken records in Paris on Saturday night. On one wing, Damian Penaud could score his 39th try to overtake Serge Blanco as France’s all-time leading try-scorer, on the other Louis Bielle-Biarrey needs his eighth try to break the record set by Jacob Stockdale for the most in a single tournament, and in between the two, Thomas Ramos needs seven points to go past Frédéric Michalak and become the country’s record scorer. If their team score four tries between them, they will break the mark of 29 in one Six Nations, set by England back in 2001.
None of which will matter a damn if they don’t win.
Because no one doubts that this France team contain a glittering array of talent. Even without Antoine Dupont, who has ruptured his ACL, there are four, five, six, seven, as many as you’d choose to mention, men in it who would, or could, be considered among the best in the world in their position. The question is whether, after finishing runners-up in this competition four times in the last five years, they can finally come together to win something to go with their one grand slam in 2022. A title is the least of what is expected of them, and given that the French game has rearranged itself to give them the best possible shot at success, they’re all out of excuses.
The French public were just beginning to lose patience. And then the grand slam slipped away when they went down to that one-point defeat by England at Twickenham, in one of their most slipshod performances since Fabien Galthié took over as head coach. All of a sudden the team were teetering, and Galthié was under as much pressure as he ever had been. In times past all the different constituencies in the French game might have turned on each other. Instead, the team turned together on everyone else, starting with the Italians, who they battered 73-24 in their very next game.
You wonder whether the players and coaches themselves have finally got fed up with falling short of what they’re capable. Galthié ruthlessly dropped Matthieu Jalibert, and then lashed out at Andrew Porter and Tadhg Beirne for the accident that injured Dupont. Romain Ntamack got stuck into the authorities over the way the Irish had managed to use a loophole in the laws to get Garry Ringrose back in from his ban a week early. Shaun Edwards hasn’t been seen smiling since January. And assistant coach William Servat shot down a question about whether the team were happy to beat Ireland. “Why do you want euphoria?” Servat said. “We didn’t win anything.”
Beneath all this anger, there seems to be a real feeling that something has finally clicked in the last fortnight, and the last 40 minutes of last Saturday’s match against Ireland in particular. There are the wins that come and go after an hour, a day, a week, and then there are the wins that linger, which mark a moment in the history of one, or other, or both, teams. Wales’s 30-3 thrashing of England in Cardiff in 2013 was one, Ireland’s two-point triumph over France in Paris in 2018 another, and right now the French are wondering whether they just had one of their own.
“I have the impression that there’s a transfer of power in European rugby,” said former flanker Serge Betsen, who was watching from a seat in the press box. “The French team is becoming the best in Europe, the one that will dominate the continent in coming years.”
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Finn Russell challenged Scotland to add some sheen to their Six Nations campaign in Paris as he lamented the fact they have only a “disruptor” role to play in today’s three-way title shootout.
With just home wins over Italy and Wales to their name, co-captain Russell believes a rare away victory over title-chasing France would go a long way to enhancing how their campaign is viewed.
Russell, who missed all three of his conversion attempts, including a last-minute kick, in a one-point defeat to England, said: “If we get a win then we’d probably look back at one of my kicks that could have had us winning the title. I think the England game is probably the one that got away.
“But if we can finish up with a win this weekend – the frustration for the England game would still be there, obviously – I think we could look back at this tournament as a decent enough tournament.
“There’s probably a few folk questioning how the Scotland team is going, but if I hit that kick or one of the kicks, then it’s probably viewed very differently. At this level, it’s all about the results. But at the end of the tournament you can fully assess how it’s been and how you’ve played.” PA Media
Betsen wasn’t the only one who thought it. “Overall, this match in Dublin was a tipping point for all of us,” said Ntamack, “in terms of our state of mind, our defence, the score difference, we had lost the best player in the world after 20 minutes, but we were able to find the resources to hit harder.”
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The match turned so sharply that, a week later, you still need to slow it down to map exactly what happened. There were 35 minutes to play, and France had only just gone five points behind. They had lost Dupont 10 minutes earlier, and, for 10 minutes, looked lost without him. The one back they had among their replacements, Maxime Lucu, was already on, Pierre-Louis Barassi had gone off with a head injury, and they had put Oscar Jégou, a 21-year-old flanker, in at outside centre. All this against an Irish side who were chasing a third straight Six Nations title, and who had already come from behind at half-time to beat both England and Wales.
An Irish side who, it turned out, were just about to concede 34 points and one, two, three, four tries in 30 minutes of wildfire rugby, dizzy sprints and wizardly kicks and hard charges and flying passes.
The French have always had a hot streak in them; just ask the 1999 All Blacks, the Irish side that went down 44-5 in 2002, the English who shipped 53 at Twickenham in 2023. If that 30-minute stretch against Ireland really is going to turn out to be any different from any number of others they’ve had over the years, the team will need to bring that same self-conviction that marked their play in that second half to every match they play from here on towards the World Cup in 2027, starting, of course, with the final match of this year’s tournament against Scotland in Paris this Saturday night.