The French had been waiting 21 years to see their team beat the Springboks at the Stade de France. In that time the team turned through successive generations and multiple iterations, risen, fallen and risen again. Now, at last, they have done it. Only by two, 21-19, and hell, they were hanging on by the fingertips for the final 30 minutes, but they have, at last, beaten the best team in the world in their national stadium. And after all that they did it with a team that had barely won a lineout, lost almost every scrum and which was missing a host of players.
What they did have, however, was Antoine Dupont. No fly-half? No problem. Earlier in the week their head coach, Fabien Galthié, had dismissed the idea that he and his opposite number, Rassie Erasmus, were playing mindgames with each other as “comic-book stuff”. Turns out this was just another bluff. Galthié had said Dupont was going to start at fly-half and, sure, he wore No 10 on his back, but he played the game in his usual position. It was his understudy Maxime Lucu who switched positions to play first receiver.
This was just one of the twists in a match full of them. There were a fistful of cards, some fantastic freewheeling tries, long stretches of intense scrummaging, a clutch of hugely controversial decisions by both coaches and the refereeing team and, at the very end of it all, one crucial missed kick, a conversion attempt by Manie Libbok that would have tied the scores with seven minutes left to play.
The French had made an occasion of it. Friday night at the Stade de France may just be the best show in sport, the pre-game was a full Cecil B DeMille production, with fireworks, flamethrowers, floodlights, a multicoloured drone show involving a three-storey cockerel that then reassembled itself into a beating red, blue and white heart before transforming into a vast tricolore along with a performance by 150 dancers carrying LEDs who performed to an earsplitting choral rendition of Like A Prayer. Astonishingly, the match actually lived up to all this.
After 10 minutes of frantic tussle, the game took its first turn when Lood de Jager was sent to the sin-bin for a high tackle. The French took advantage of the precious extra inches of space in the Springbok defence. Their wing Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang came down the right side and dived through Damian Willemse’s tackle to score in the corner.
Their next score did not have quite that kind of panache. Dupont lashed a 50-22 right up to the South African try-line and as France tried to spread the ball Yoram Moefana’s pass hit his teammate Kalvin Gourgues flush in the face and ricocheted away over the try-line, where Théo Attissogbe pounced to touch it down. “I’m not sure how you prepare a defence for a ball that bounces off a guy’s face,” Erasmus said.
Erasmus had a trick up his sleeve, too. An hour before kick-off he shuffled his line-up and dropped Ox Nché, Malcolm Marx, and Wilco Louw back into the replacements. All of a sudden a French bench featuring three front-row replacements with 25 international caps between them was facing up to the prospect of coming on to pack down against the gnarliest front row in international rugby. Erasmus actually pressed the detonator on the bomb squad early. He sent on Marx, Nché and Louw in the 35th minute.
It was an odd decision, as South Africa had been dominant in the scrum. They had already pulled one try back with their own rolling maul, although before anyone could catch their breath Dupont had put Louis Bielle-Biarrey through with a tumbling grubber to put France 14 points up again. It was around now that everything started to unravel. Lucu was shown a yellow card for a high tackle of his own and was only just back on the field when Grandidier-Nkanang was off too because he slapped down a pass in the French 22. In between the two Jasper Wiese was shown a red for an illegal clearout.
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Somewhere among all the fun, South Africa had one try struck off when Kurt-Lee Arendse was ruled offside after he sliced through the French defence and scored another when Cobus Reinach bundled his way after a rolling maul. The French were clinging on now, the crowd crossed fingers and clasped hands, while their team fought to defend their seven-point lead. They endured an excruciating series of scrums on their own try-line, in which their replacement pack creaked and buckled till Régis Montagne was shown yet another yellow card.
South Africa finally burst through but the ball was held up. Soon enough though the Springboks came back at them again and this time Marx finished off a rolling maul. That ought to have levelled the scores, only Libbok missed the crucial conversion. “We weren’t just outplayed, we were out-thought,” Erasmus said. “I’m not going to sit here and say I am going to take the positives – it feels shit.”
Source: www.theguardian.com
