Back in 2009, Jacques Brunel made a bet with his players at Perpignan. If they won the championship that season, Brunel would give a piggyback to their prop, Sebastian Bozzi. Brunel is a slight man, Bozzi is not. The latter came in at 19 stone. Brunel was 55 years old. Well, Perpignan beat Clermont in the final, 22-13, and won the Brennus Shield for the first time in 50 years. And after the match Brunel hoisted Bozzi up on his shoulders and set off around the field. “That’s Jacques,” says Perry Freshwater, who played in that game, “always as good as his word”. A week later, Brunel had a heart attack.
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Brunel is 64 now, and has just taken on another heavy load. He took over from Guy Novès as the France coach at the start of January. Under Novès, France had lost five of their last six games and drawn the other, against Japan in Paris. “I have the impression that the difficulties are related to a state of mind,” Brunel said, “a gloom, a loss of confidence, I want to change this climate, to air it out, I want to see life and smiles.” But behind the results, France have bigger problems. The national set-up is a mess, beset by structural issues that cannot be fixed with a smile or a piggyback.
Joe Worsley was working with Brunel at Bordeaux before he took on the national job. “There’s so many handicaps,” Worsley says, “the lack of time with the national team, the length of the domestic season, the technical ability of the players. There are so many areas in which they’re so far behind everyone else.” Brunel’s grand plan was that he would be in charge of selecting the team, but the coaching would be done by five or six of the best men in the Top 14, who would work with France part-time. It was a fine idea in theory. Problem was, no one wanted to take a job.
Which is why Brunel has ended up with an assistant, Julien Bonnaire, who has never even worked as a coach before. Worsley understands why Brunel took the job – “national pride is the main reason” – but thinks:“You’d have to be a brave man to say ‘yes’.” Freshwater describes it as a “hiding to nothing”. But Brunel has nothing to lose. He is “not really bothered about the press or worried about his image, and doesn’t even have an agent. He has been in the game for 50 years and “when all’s said and done,” Freshwater says, “I’m sure his dream was to lead the French national side.”
When all’s said and done I’m sure his dream was to lead the French national side
Brunel is a Gascon. He was born in the little village of Courrensan, where his parents ran a vineyard and made Armagnac. When he was coaching Colomiers, the players always knew when he was happy with them because he’d pull out a bottle of his choice vintage to share with them. He went into the family business himself, for a time, ran a cafe too, and worked for the farmer’s union. But rugby is the thread that runs through his life. He joined Auch when he was 13, and grew up to be a dashing back, a fly-half and full-back behind a “pretty heavy and hairy pack of forwards”.
Brunel took on a very different style as a coach. Philippe Ducousso, who was with him at Colomiers, said Brunel was a “D’Artagnan as a player who became an Athos as a coach”. That squares with Worsley’s view, too. “Jacques is a pragmatist,” he says. “And he’s fluent in realpolitik.” Novès fell out with the president of the French federation, Bernard Laporte. That will not happen to Brunel. They are good friends, Laporte employed Brunel as his forwards coach when he was in charge of the French team between 2001 and 2007. And besides, Worsley says: “Jacques is very good at managing upwards.”
Laporte says that he hired Brunel “because his players love him”. Freshwater agrees. “At Perpignan we wanted to play for him. It’s an old cliche, but Jacques made you want to put your body on the line.”
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Worsley saw that effect in France’s game against Ireland. “Novès apparently destroyed his relationship with the players, so it became a terrible environment. Jacques seems to have got them in good spirits. The emotion they put into that match against Ireland was huge. And they should have won as a result. It wasn’t really down to the gameplan or their technique, it was just the emotional effort they put in.”
Rugby players do not come like Brunel anymore. He was a smoker, a thinker and a drinker, though only ever champagne, never beer, and he quit the cigs after the heart attack. “A very cultured guy,” says Freshwater. “And very charismatic. His eyes twinkle when he talks. The French would say he is a good ‘federator’. He manages to make sure that everyone is pushing in the same direction, and playing for each other and playing for the coaches. That’s where his strength is.”
Two years out from the World Cup, he will need every ounce of that talent if he’s going to turn this French team around.