Beware Les Bleus return
IT was hard not to get swept up in the thrill of it all. The old enemy – ours and theirs – reeling and on the back foot. Eddie Jones a face on him like thunder and the men in blue playing the most remarkable, scintillating rugby. A new generation to the manor born under new management.
The French are back and boy has rugby missed that touch of Gallic flair. There have been little hints of it over the years here and there, but no more than that. It’s been a pretty barren spell for the French in the 6 Nations Championship.
Les Bleus’ last outright victory in the championship came all of ten years ago in 2010 and in that time they slipped to some quite ignominious lows, losing twice to Italy albeit in Rome, but even so, not good, especially not for what should be a giant of the game and probably that’s the thing that should worry anybody with an interest in Irish rugby.
Ireland’s most successful decade since the 1890s – three titles in both, remembering, of course, that the
French didn’t take part until the 20th century – coincided and probably not coincidentally with one of the worst ever decades for the French.
With the French back and ramping up for the 2023 World Cup on home soil we’ve a feeling that the good times for Irish rugby are about to become be that much more difficult to sustain. The French after all have the largest rugby playing population of any country in the world, greater even than New Zealand and England with half-a-million registered players. Ireland has in and around one-hundred thousand.
If Franch start to get it right we might not get a look in after a while and as Sunday showed they’re on the right track to doing just that. Fabien Galthié seems like a guy who knows what he’s doing and most worryingly of all seems the type of guy who knows what he doesn’t know. Galthié’s acquisition of Shaun Edwards is really shrewd and not at all typical of the French union over the last decade.
Honestly the more we think about it the more concerned we’re starting to get. That England were able to come back at France in the second half showed that there’s still a ways to go before Les Bleus get to the all-conquering stage, even so a trip to Paris in a couple of weeks time seems a daunting enough prospect doesn’t it? We should probably get used to it. As much fun as it was to see the English chariot knocked off its axle, it’ll be our turn for the same treatment before long.