France beat South Africa 21-19 at the Stade de France on Friday night, an injury-ravaged side winning the air whilst the Springboks won the scrum, and Antoine Dupont produced the finest individual display of his career to hold it all together.
Here’s our five takeaways from the game.
The top line
What a night. Honestly, by the hour mark you’d stopped trying to count the cards, the reviews and the bodies on the floor, and simply stood in Saint-Denis and watched two of the best sides in the world go at each other with a ferocity that belonged in a World Cup knockout, which, three years on from that quarter-final, is more or less what this felt like, with 20,000 South Africans having turned the streets around the stadium green and gold by mid-afternoon.
The context has to come in one breath, because it matters. France were without Matthieu Jalibert, Romain Ntamack, Antoine Hastoy, Thomas Ramos, Emmanuel Meafou, Thibaud Flament, Demba Bamba and Lenni Nouchi, lost Julien Marchand to a thigh strain shortly before kick-off, had lost nine of their last ten Tests against South Africa and the last five at this ground, and then collected three yellow cards along the way. They still won. Quite how, might remain a question South Africa will ask for an age, but the answer lay with the truly great Dupont.
Make no mistake, this was rugby at the top of Everest, and it came down to two different games being played on the same pitch. France won the air and the broken field, kicking to grass and scoring three tries in 17 first-half minutes; South Africa won the set-piece, scored all three of their tries off the lineout and maul, and turned 21-7 at the break into 21-19 with a scrum 40 metres out in the 78th minute. In between stood two defences that were breathtaking, ferocious, unyielding, indefatigable. And holding the whole thing together, wearing ten and playing mostly at nine, was that man Toto.
South Africa threw everything at them, and this was no fluke. It was a match won by heart over head, and the Stade de France gave France an extra man even when they had 14. It was fitting it was Dupont who delivered the knock-out blow, winning a ruck to close South Africa out at the final whistle. Just wow.
The air against the scrum
Here’s the thing about France’s kicking plan: it was built to keep the ball on the field and remove the driving maul from the game. Fabien Galthié brought Maxime Petitjean in from Toulon to work on it, and from the first ten minutes the intent was obvious, France kicking to grass rather than touch and daring the Springboks to run it back at them. Every kick that stays in play is a lineout the Boks don’t get, and a lineout they don’t get is a maul they can’t set and a corner they can’t go to, which against this pack is half their attacking game gone before it starts.
It produced the tries, too. Théo Attissogbe’s 50:22 drew a late shot on the kicker, the penalty came back to where the kick came down, and from the next attack Yoram Moefana’s pass went off Kalvin Gourgues’ head and forward to Attissogbe, who scored; the TMO had a long look, but a knock-on needs a hand or an arm, and the try stood. Eight minutes later Dupont slid a grubber into the space behind the defence and Louis Bielle-Biarrey, the electric scooter himself, did the rest.
For all that, France should have been out of sight long before the Bok bench arrived. They could have been 14 up inside the first quarter of an hour, Bielle-Biarrey bundled into touch and Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang a metre short, and when they kicked a penalty to the corner, Lood de Jager stole the throw from Peato Mauvaka, who’d only come into the side when Marchand, picked partly for his jackal, was ruled out. Add three penalties that missed touch and a kick at goal that missed at 67 minutes, and France left enough out there to have won this at a canter.
The hole in the plan was the penalty count, and the cards that almost cost them the game, mostly as their props held on like men hanging out of a broken rollercoaster. France conceded 14 on the night, every one of them handing back the lineout the kicking was designed to take away, and South Africa finished with 15 lineouts at 100 per cent. Jan-Hendrik Wessels’ maul try at 29 minutes came straight after back-to-back French penalties in their own 22, and Malcolm Marx’s at 71 came off the same platform.
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Rassie Erasmus swapped his entire front-row an hour before kick-off, as he did in Cape Town in August, starting Wessels, Gerhard Steenekamp and Thomas du Toit on a dry, still night and keeping Ox Nche, Marx and Wilco Louw for later; at 21-7 down he couldn’t wait for later, and sent all three on at 37 minutes. France conceded nince scrum penalties, six of them after the switch, with Nche taking Régis Montagne apart on the tighthead side until Montagne went to the bin at 68 minutes and Cameron Woki had to come off so Sipili Falatea could return. That’s a back-rower lost just to keep the scrum contested, with the Boks camped in French territory.
How thin the margin was shows in the numbers, with South Africa having 55 per cent of the ball, 58 per cent of the territory, 150 carries to France’s 112 and 188 post-contact metres to 102.
France v Springboks winners and losers: Dupont otherworldly, Sacha a shadow of himself
A night that belonged to Dupont
The team sheet said Dupont at ten and Maxime Lucu at nine. Within a minute Dupont was at the base, and for the rest of the night la charnière swapped everything, nine and ten changing from phase to phase in a hybrid hinge that took Erasmus’s favourite selection word and turned it back on him. Galthié called them “two icons in France” in the week, and the first try showed why the pairing works: Dupont passed out, Lucu looped round him as the extra man, very rugby league, and Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang finished in the corner.
Lucu was fabulous until his yellow, his tempo and the length of his kicking giving France a second playmaker who could take the ball off Dupont’s shoulder at speed, and when he went to the bin for a high shot on Sacha Feinberg-Mngomezulu, Gourgues, whom the Boks had been expected to target at 13 and who was phenomenal instead, stepped in at fly-half for ten minutes as a third man in the hinge.
But this was Dupont’s night, and I’ll say it plainly: it’s one of the greatest individual performance I’ve ever seen in the 452 Test matches I have covered. He controlled the Test in every facet there is, kicking, rucking, tackling, carrying and distributing; he made two line breaks, put the grubber in for Bielle-Biarrey, tracked 30 metres back across the field to take out Kurt-Lee Arendse with the line at his mercy, held Pieter-Steph du Toit up over the line almost on his own, forced Damian Willemse into spilling a high ball at 75 minutes, and then, with the Boks running from that last scrum, won the turnover that ended it.
South African supporters have been on his back for years. This was his answer, delivered at the ground where France had lost their last five Tests against them. He was peerless.
Defence that took your breath away
Both defences were sensational, and the numbers explain why the scoreboard stayed so tight for so long. The Boks made 75 tackles in the first 23 minutes and still conceded 14 points, which tells you how much France asked of them early; by the end it was France making the tackles, 173 to 141, with François Cros top of the sheet on 17, two of them dominant, and Moefana on 15.
Cros was everywhere he needed to be, a scything machine. His turnover early in the second half sent France the length of the field, and his tackle in the 77th minute, with the Boks coming down the middle, was the hit of the night, one that underlined everything that defines desperation and everything that makes Cros the formidable force he is; Esteban Capilla won a turnover on France’s own line, and when Montagne’s yellow left France short again, they held out against a Bok scrum 40 metres out and everything South Africa threw at them from it.
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On the other side, Damian de Allende made 15 tackles, Jesse Kriel was outstanding in midfield, Pieter-Steph du Toit carried 18 times, and Cobus Reinach and Cameron Hanekom changed the tempo off the bench, Reinach scoring the try at 50 minutes that brought it back to 21-14. Feinberg-Mngomezulu fell away badly, though, and the moment that defined his night came at 38 minutes, when he broke through with two men on his inside shoulder and the posts at his mercy and didn’t pass.
There was plenty for Andrea Piardi to manage. Lood de Jager’s yellow at 17 minutes cost the Boks 14 points; Jasper Wiese’s arm into Gourgues’ head at a clear-out was upgraded to red by the bunker; and when Grandidier-Nkanang knocked on deliberately with South Africa two on none and no French cover behind him, Piardi sent him to the bin without awarding the penalty try. The law asks whether a try would probably have been scored, and readers can judge that one for themselves, and we know where we sit. South Africa might be rightly furious about that.
Looking ahead
Find a front-row. France have the most dangerous attack in the world and, on this evidence, a scrum that can’t survive the last half-hour against the Springboks, which a year out from the World Cup is the one problem Galthié can’t design his way around, however much he enjoyed designing a solution at half-back this week.
Argentina come to the Stade de France on Saturday, November 21, the same day the Springboks go to Dublin, with the Nations Championship finals in London the following weekend, and the French scrum will be the first thing the Pumas look at. It wasn’t a World Cup, and nothing will make up for the disappointment of 2023, but given France’s injury list this was a game of the very highest calibre, and one of their greatest ever nights. It will never make up for the 2023 loss, but the Stade de France rocks on Friday the 13th. Breathtaking.
READ MORE: France v Springboks: Result, scorers, match stats, line-ups
Source: www.planetrugby.com
