From Page 36// Grosso grounded
Soderling in the fourth round in 2009 and Novak Djokovic in the quarterfinals in 2015.
‘‘What you did and what you are doing,’’ Thiem told Nadal during the trophy ceremony, ‘‘is one of the most outstanding things that any athlete is doing in any sport.’’
If there were any reason for a bit of intrigue entering yesterday’s match, it was this: Thiem beat Nadal in two sets on red clay at Rome in May 2017 and again at Madrid last month.
‘‘I am sure you will win here in the next couple of years,’’ Nadal told Thiem afterward. ‘‘After we got the yellow card, we lacked confidence in ourselves as a team, we just let it go,’’ Le Roux said.
‘‘We lost our focus and you can’t do that against the All Blacks, so we let in a few points in the second half and that’s obviously not what we wanted to do.
‘‘We had a brilliant first half and hopefully this weekend we can do two halves like we did in the first half.’’
For the first 40 minutes the French did show what they can do during this three-test tour to New Zealand, but the issue is whether they believe in themselves enough to hold onto a lead for a whole game.
‘‘We’ve got a good squad, we’ve got some character in the young and older players,’’ Le Roux said.
‘‘We worked really hard in the Six Nations and we’re trying to build something up.
‘‘The All
Blacks are the best team in the world, so when we came here we said to ourselves that we really want to be competitive against them.
‘‘That’s our main goal and we did really well with that in the first half, but not the second.
‘‘There are some small system errors that we need to sort out in our defence and we had a few video sessions yesterday and today.
‘‘We will get better, but we’ve come off the back of a long season and we’ve all been working in different defence systems, so everyone’s sliding into the right positions this weekend and hopefully we’ll go better.’’
This is a French team that’s still coming together under coach Jacques Brunel, who only took over running the team before this year’s Six Nations.
Le Roux, who made his debut for France in 2012 says, Brunel is trying to return the team to playing the ‘French way’, after previous coaches Philippe Saint-Andre´ and Guy Nove`s took the team away from that.
‘‘He’s trying to go back to basics and let us play running rugby,’’ Le Roux said. ‘‘Not run everything, but bring back the French flair.
‘‘The previous two coaches tried to bring too much structure to the French side, which didn’t work. So we want to have good exits out of our 22 and be structured, but after that we want to create space.
‘‘We’ve got a good group, there’s a nice ambience here and things have changed a lot, so I think we can be confident for the weekend.’’