Despite everything the clichés lead us to believe, we usually do know which French team are going to turn up, and while they may well be able to beat anyone on the day they seldom do. For the past five years France have been as mercurial as the February weather. They last won the Six Nations in 2010, came second the year after, and since then have finished fourth, sixth, fourth, fourth and fifth. Among the world’s top 10 teams, only Scotland and Argentina have a worse record in the past five years than the French, who have played 55, won 24, and lost 29. Lately they have taken to consoling themselves with how little by which they have been losing. Narrow defeats against New Zealand and Australia in the autumn counted as highlights in a year in which they won just four matches.
Odd thing is, according to a recent survey, rugby has never been so popular in France. It found that a third of the French population say they have an interest in the sport. That figure may not stand close scrutiny, but the broad trend is backed up by the increase in attendances in elite club rugby, up 40% in the past decade. Club budgets have grown, too. In 2013, the Top 14’s TV deal was worth £31.7m to the competing teams. The new deal, signed last year, brings in more than three times that amount. Last 24 June was a high-water mark. Almost 100,000 turned out to watch the Top 14 final at the Camp Nou in Barcelona, a world record for a club match. But just five days earlier the national team, missing several key players, lost 30-19 against Argentina in Tucumán.
A lucrative league, thick with foreign players on fat salaries and a lacklustre national team, failing to live up to the fans’ expectations – the formula will feel familiar to anyone who has even a passing acquaintance with English sport. In France, it has fallen to two men to try to fix it. Guy Novès, who took charge of the national team after the last World Cup, and Bernard Laporte, who once had that job himself and was elected president of the French Rugby Federation in December last year. The hitch is that Laporte and Novès have never got on with one another, largely because Novès was so unhelpful when he was coaching Toulouse while Laporte was running the national team.
He never used to allow Laporte to come along to watch the players in training and backed Laporte’s rival for the presidency, Pierre Camou, during the elections. But then, as he’s said since, it was Camou who gave him the job to begin with, “So what else was I supposed to do?” Novès is 62, has coached more teams, and won more trophies, than any other man in France. He is not about to get into a flap now. Likewise, as poor as his results were last year, he works to his own rhythm, and says that they are making good progress. “Our expectations this year are to build a team that continues to improve constantly, to get closer to our opponents,” he says. “We’re not that far from our opponents. We cross the advantage line more than others, but we must be more efficient. We must be killers in some areas so that we can chase wins.”
Most importantly, Novès says he has identified 95% of the players he will use at the 2019 World Cup. Together with the forwards coach Yannick Bru, who (as Laporte recently reminded everyone) once swore he would never work with Novès again after their time at Toulouse, Novès has built a tough, hard-scrummaging pack. Behind them he wants a set of backs who will play in a “fast, flowing” way, with the 22‑year‑old Baptiste Serin starting at scrum-half, Camille Lopez at fly-half instead of Jean‑Marc Doussain, and key roles for the two incendiary wingers, Virimi Vakatawa and Noa Nakaitaci, both brilliant at off-loading the ball. “We want to play a running brand of rugby,” said Novès. And Lopez makes more breaks, beats more defenders, than any other French fly-half. But the selection does leave them without a reliable goal-kicker.
Laporte’s puzzle is even trickier to piece together. He has announced that from now on the national team will not select players who have qualified through the three-year residency rule. And he has also made a deal with the clubs which means French players will be released for the entire duration of both this tournament and the autumn internationals. But these were easy to arrange compared to some of the other changes he wants to make. Laporte has described the Top 14 as a “gravy train”. He believes that it should be reduced to 12 teams and that the various playoffs should be scrapped to make the season shorter, and would also like to introduce central contracts for the national squad. There is a lot to fix, and, since Laporte insists that he wants the team to win the next World Cup, only three years to get it done.
