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Why do France place more importance on the nine than the ten? And why can’t t hey set t le on a half- back pairing?

ACK IN 2015, French sports daily compiled its century of sensational the best players to have appeared for France down the decades. There wasn’t one fly-half in the top 20.

The highest-placed stand-off was Christophe Lamaison, a decent player who won 37 caps between

1996 and 2001. When he was good, Lamaison was very good, as he showed in orchestrating two stunning French comebacks – against England in 1997 (he played centre that day) and New Zealand in the semi-final of the 1999 World Cup. However, he was infuriatingly inconsistent and his haul of 380 Test points doesn’t get him close to another top 20, that of international point-scorers.

No Frenchman makes the list, with Frédéric Michalak their leading Test point-scorer with 436, which has him at 37th in the rankings. There was a time at the turn of the millennium when Michalak was tipped to become the world-class fly-half that France have never had, but instead he joined the list of Guy Camberabero, Franck Mesnel and Thierry Lacroix as talented players who didn’t quite make the top tier of tens. That pantheon includes

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