On Thursday, the French rugby club Carcassonne announced that they were entering into a commercial partnership with the pornographic website Jacquie et Michel, on the grounds that they “share values of power, endurance, and vigour”.
Carcassonne’s general manager, Christine Menardeau-Planchenault, explained that “as a family club” they had put limits on what Jacquie et Michel could get up to. “There won’t be any naked young women at half-time or any naked rugby,” she explained. Despite that, Menardeau-Planchenault added that while it is normally “hard to get people to the stadium”, tickets for their upcoming match against Biarritz were now “flying out of the box office”.
France recall Mathieu Bastareaud in bid to turn tables on England
If there has been a sudden swelling of enthusiasm for rugby in that little corner of the south, the mood everywhere else in the country is growing pretty listless. The Stade de France was only three-quarters full during the opening match of the championship against Wales. It was a Friday night kick-off, which did not help, but the real problem, as Bernard Laporte, the head of the French Federation, said on TV last weekend, is: “We have a French team which no longer makes us dream.”
Laporte thinks it has been that way for the past 10 years. Right now, France are ranked 10th in the world, and are closer in points to Spain, who are 21st, than to New Zealand, who are first.
France’s record was bad enough under their last coach, Guy Novès, who won seven of his 21 matches. It is even worse under his replacement, Jacques Brunel, who took over at the start of last year. Under him France have won only three games out of 12, one against Italy, one against England and one against Argentina.
Laporte has been forced into defending his old friend Brunel, even though, as he admits himself, there is no good defence to offer. “We changed the coach just over a year ago because we felt things weren’t going very well, and we can’t say that they’re going much better today,” Laporte said. “But it would be difficult, and certainly dangerous, to make new changes now.”
The odd thing is France were leading at half-time in seven of those same games and then went on to lose five of them. That pattern includes three of the last four Tests they have played, against South Africa, Fiji and Wales.
Quick guide
France’s recent Twickenham troubles
It is one of the more surprising sequences in rugby union – France have not won a Six Nations match at Twickenham for 14 years, and have won only twice there since the game turned professional in 1995:
March 1997: England 20-23 France
England led 20-6 after an hour but France staged a remarkable comeback with tries by Laurent Leflamand and Christophe Lamaison. Lamaison was a one-man points machine, scoring 18 from a try, two conversions, two penalties and a drop goal. Abdelatif Benazzi’s side would go on to claim a Five Nations grand slam.
February 2005: England 17-18 France
Tries from Olly Barkley and Josh Lewsey gave England a 17-6 half-time lead, but the scrum-half Dimitri Yachvili kicked six penalties while Charlie Hodgson and Barkley missed six between them, as France inflicted the world champions’ eighth defeat in 11 Tests.
The other matches: England’s glory
Eleven home wins since 1995, from the resounding – the 55-35 triumph in March 2015 with England chasing the title on the last day (they came up just short) – to the narrow 19-16 win two years ago, when Ben Te’o’s 71st-minute try made the difference.
But in France, they are more worried about the mental strength of the players than their physical fitness. And with good reason. “In the course of the match there is always this fear of winning that resurfaces, these old demons who come back,” said their young scrum-half Baptiste Serin this week. “It can only be in the head,” says Laporte.
The No 8 Louis Picamoles says all the criticism is starting to weigh on Les Bleus. “We want to be aware of how lucky we are to be here, to enjoy these moments, despite the bad luck we’ve had. There were some very positive things about last Friday, but we’ve all been talking a lot about the negatives. I don’t want to sound like we’re a bunch of teddy bears, but the danger is if we keep seeing, reading, hearing negative things, we’ll become negative too. It doesn’t help us.”
Brunel has started to fold in some of the young French players who won the under-20s world championship last year, such as Romain Ntamack and Demba Bamba. The danger is that by playing in a losing team they are learning all the wrong things.
There is hope, Laporte says, in this new generation, who should be ready by the time France host the World Cup in 2023. But even he seems to have given up on the tournament before it, starting in September this year in Japan. “I wouldn’t bet my house that we will be world champions, mathematically there is very little chance,” Laporte said. However, in his next breath, he added: “But our team has potential, and hopefully anything is possible.” He, at least, hasn’t given up dreaming just yet.