Tright here was anger, of course. There at all times is on the morning after a loss just like the one France suffered on Sunday night time. And at Le Rugby bistro, on Rue Roquépine in Paris’s eighth district, one of the 4 outdated males standing on the bar was venting his. The referee, Ben O’Keeffe, was a idiot, he defined once more, it had been a deliberate knock on, he repeated. The others, who, you guess, had heard all this from him extra than as soon as already, pursed their lips, pulled on their ears and nodded in settlement, silent as Philippe Sella and Didier Camberabero and Pierre Berbizier and all the opposite outdated gamers within the black and white pictures on the wall.
Antoine Dupont was proper, the person continued, O’Keeffe wasn’t as much as it. O’Keeffe, it appears, like all referees, isn’t simply there to run the sport, but to provide the losers somebody accountable after it.
There was disappointment, of course there was disappointment. Not the heavy type, there may be far an excessive amount of of that round for anybody to really feel it about something as trivial as this. The entrance pages of the papers folded on the desk close by led with photos of the vigil that was held in Arras for the murdered schoolteacher Dominique Bernard. Instead, the disappointment was the kind you’re feeling on the finish of a party, an unavoidable sense that there was a little much less to sit up for, and a little much less pleasure to distract us from all that. It wasn’t one thing anybody spoke about, but it had settled throughout the match, just like the gray clouds that unfold over Marseille on Monday morning.
And there was sympathy, for Dupont and all the remainder of them, who’ve, between them, finished a lot to revive the game right here within the final 4 years. Under Fabien Galthié, France’s run on the World Cup had grow to be one thing near a nationwide mission. The stunning thought on the coronary heart of it could solely have been an phantasm glimpsed within the aftermath of all these victories, but nonetheless. It was so highly effective that when Galthié known as up Bastien Chalureau, who’s interesting in opposition to a conviction of a racially motivated assault on two fellow gamers, Emmanuel Macron himself felt he needed to give Galthié a reminder of simply how vital the choice was.
Macron was caught speaking to Galthié throughout a go to to see the workforce at their coaching floor. “We must not have any controversies,” Macron advised him. That dialog confirmed how excessive the stakes have been for the French groups these previous couple of weeks, but in the long run, the importance of it lay extra in what Chalureau’s choice stated about their waning possibilities of profitable them. Galthié typically talks about future, in the way in which, maybe, that solely a bespectacled French rugby coach can. It was the phrase he used to explain France’s grand slam victory within the Six Nations final yr, and once more within the run-up to this match.
But there has been a rising sense that this wasn’t going to be France’s second in any case. You might really feel it approaching when Romain Ntamack ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament three weeks earlier than the match, which didn’t simply price France their beginning fly-half, but additionally his instinctive partnership together with his inseparable buddy, and clubmate, Dupont. It acquired worse once they needed to name up Chalureau to switch Paul Willemse, the largest and most bloodthirsty of all their forwards. Willemse is a one-man wrecking crew, precisely the kind of participant you would possibly ship in to filter out a den of Springboks. He and Ntamack had began virtually each current match that mattered.
So there was some ruefulness on the hand destiny performed. But extra than that, there was, a measure of phlegmatic acceptance. As Galthié stated “over the last four years we have achieved something great, so no regrets, we were entitled to lose the way we did.”
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The party could all have ended a little sooner than everybody hoped but it had been a hell of a bash whereas it lasted. And as one of the opposite males ingesting on the bar of Le Rugby stated, as soon as he’d had his fill of his buddy’s bellyaching, “that’s sport”. And in addition to, the barman chipped in, “it was a grand match”. The different 4 nodded at that. It was, they agreed, a grand match.
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