France’s historic demolition by New Zealand in the Rugby World Cup has plunged the nation into a grim moment of soul-searching about its whole approach to the sport. Asked how the country should respond to what amounted to a “national humiliation”, the former centre-right sports minister, Rama Yade, told iTele TV that France “must not give in to panic” but must calmly sit down and learn the lessons from the defeat.
But the media were outraged by France’s worst thrashing in Rugby World Cup history. The sports paper L’Equipe headlined: “The disaster”, warning scathingly that France had now become just a minor rugby nation. Le Monde called it “Black Saturday”. La Dépêche du Midi called it the “ultimate disaster” saying French rugby “had fallen into ridicule”.
A score of regional papers ran the simple front-page headline “Humiliated”, including Le Parisien, which said the French team had given a “pathetic and pitiable” image and the match was “grotesque”. The paper said that France’s game was so far from the All Blacks that “one wonders if the two teams were playing the same sport”.
Like many papers, Le Parisien said France had seen this coming for four years. It felt the only good thing to emerge from the defeat was that the reign of the outgoing French coach, Philippe Saint-André, was over.
Le Figaro warned that the French rugby team had inflicted “humiliation, pain and despair” on their supporters and that the “trauma of the players would take some time to recover from.” The paper said French rugby had seen its “day of shame”, and “we hope a revolution will follow.”
Analysts have begun a painful post-mortem pulling apart everything from the professional club system, dominance of foreign stars, training, youth opportunities and the heavy fixtures calendar. The debate is likely to rage on.
