We should beware the wounded rooster
T’S always enough to put the hairs standing on the back of your neck. The band strikes up and straight away you just know it’s going to be something special. Eighty thousand French men and women singing as one the single best national anthem in the world.
Really it’s the perfect rugby anthem. Inspirational and rousing, a literal call to arms. Listening to it, even as an Irish man, you’d be half tempted to take to the barricades or to storm the Bastille yourself.
La Marseillaise invention has dried up and so have the results. They haven’t won the Six Nations in their last seven attempts – they even finished bottom of the table in 2013 and have more often than not finished the bottom half of the table in the years since their last victory in 2010.
The situation was considered so dire that for the first time ever a French national coach, Guy Noves, was sacked from his job just after Christmas with former assistant coach Jacques Brunel ( pictured) installed in his place. Looking at it from the outside the timing, just a little over a month before the championship, seems a little odd. It speaks of chaos behind the scenes, a last minute heave against a man who, whatever his faults, has been a giant of the European Cup.
Brunel, to be fair, doesn’t seem a bad appointment. He won some notable victories during his tenure as Italian coach. The problem is more that he’s been parachuted in there by the head of the French Federation – Bernard Laporte, the man under whom Brunel was assistant coach – with hardly any time to prepare the squad for the Six Nations.
The time to make a change, surely, was before the November Internationals when game plans could be laid down, set-plays worked upon and personnel trialled. Contrast the French preparation for this weekend’s game and Ireland’s and you can see only one winner and, you know what, that’s what makes us nervous.
Always there somewhere at the back of our minds is the memory of the World Cup semi-final in Twickenham between France and New Zealand in 1999. Widely written off the French delivered possibly the greatest one off performance in the history of the game. The French, they can turn it on. It hasn’t seemed that way for a while and they don’t have a player of the genius of Fabien Galthié pulling the strings any more, but against Ireland in Paris would you put it past them?
If you’re not nervous when the brass band strikes up for La Marseillaise then you’ve probably not been paying attention all these years. Hold tight, brace for impact and allez les Verts.