Parra has his eye on a final flourish
FOR a while, it looked as if Morgan Parra’s season – and possibly his career – had ended with an unwelcome whimper rather than a thoroughly merited bang. The 34-year-old Stade Francais scrum-half suffered an ankle injury midway through the first-half of Sunday’s 13-17 ‘Fan Days’ loss to local rivals Racing 92 at Stade Jean Bouin, and was replaced by James Hall.
Early indications weren’t promising, with reports suggesting that Parra might need an operation that would definitely end his season, and could pull down the curtain on his playing career – amid reports he is set to join the club’s coaching staff at the end of the campaign.
News from the camp, however, is that no surgery is being considered. Word is Parra has torn ligaments in his ankle, but intends to be patched up and playing again in time for the Parisian side’s trip to his old haunt, Clermont, in early May. In domestic terms, he looks set to miss only Stade’s trip to Brive on April 15 and the meeting against Toulouse on April 22.
There’s no doubt Stade Francais – who hosted Lyon in the Challenge Cup yesterday – needed a dose of late-season luck. Despite being third in the Top 14, they had stumbled to two domestic losses in their last two outings, losing 37-9 at Toulon before their derby reverse last Sunday.
They have lost a number of players to injury – Clément Castets and Sione Tui will not feature again this season, and Sitaleki Timani, like Parra, is racing to be fit in time for the final sprint to the play-offs.
Canal Plus reported in January the scrum-half, who joined Stade Francais from Clermont at the end of the previous season, would move from dressing room to backroom at Stade Jean Bouin at the end of the current campaign.
He sort-of denied it in an interSo with radio station Europe1, saying: “I’ve been told I’m retiring, and nothing has been decided,” he insisted soon after the news broke.
But, he added: “I’m not saying I’m not considering it – I’m thinking about moving to the other side but I have to be ready in my head. There are a lot of discussions with the staff.”
Those retirement rumours intensified from the moment Parra landed awkwardly after jumping to take a high ball in the 22nd minute of last Sunday’s derby. And it’s easy to imagine the prospect of signing off with a Top 14 play-off run, maybe all the way to the final, holds major appeal for a player whose career is one of what ifs, ill-fortune and might-have-beens.
Because Parra – once hailed the successor to Jean-Baptiste Élissalde, when he made his international debut as a 19-year-old back in 2008 – was an innocent victim of the decline and fall of France as a rugby nation between 2011 and 2020. A period that would have been his prime.
When he did, finally, speak out in moderated frustration – 70 caps after his first international outing, and when he had possibly earned a little leniency – following the 44-8 loss to England in February 2019, his international career abruptly ended.
It’s not as if he pointed a finger at anyone in particular when he said, immediately post-match: “We are not up to standard. We have to be honest … we were not at the level. Afterwards, finding solutions is complicated. We, the players, are trying, but it’s complicated.”
Injuries played their part in a stop-start, on-off international career, as they do for anyone. But Parra’s greatest fault? Playing at a time when France were disorganised and in disarray; when consecutive coaches couldn’t decide on their ideal side, let alone a coherent gameplan; when clubs and country really weren’t talking to each other. Philippe Saint-Andre switched at various times between Parra, Thierry Lacrampe and Ludovic Radosavljevic, Maxime Machenaud, Sébastien Tillous-Borde and, towards the end of his tenure, Rory Kockott.
He didn’t enter the plans of Saint-Andre’s successor Guy Noves, following France’s disasview trous 2015 World Cup; but he was – until his strong words – in the thinking of Jacques Brunel, who stepped in to the international breach when then FFR President Bernard Laporte sacked Noves.
And it’s this that proves luck has played a massive part in the resurgence of France. And it’s Parra’s misfortune to be on the wrong side of the balance.
Now former FFR president Laporte, disgraced and appealing against his corruption conviction, will tell anyone who will listen that the return of France as a rugby power came when he appointed Fabien Galthie as head coach.
There’s some truth in this. Obviously. Galthie deserves credit for his all-and-everything approach. And Laporte’s – and Brunel’s – roles in bringing the clubs on board, after winning the World Cup bid, and for assembling a strong coaching staff willing and able to follow Galthie’s lead.
But Laporte carefully glosses over the bit where he first tried to appoint Warren Gatland, only to be thwarted by French clubs who voted in a referendum to reject the idea of an overseas head coach.
Laporte turned to Galthie, who was a TV pundit at the time, having been relieved of his duties at Toulon a year earlier. He may not have been in the conversation for the job had he not been sacked, and had Laporte not been denied his foreign coach.
Make no mistake, the chances of Antoine Dupont not being France’s first choice scrum-half today are so remote as to be in a cold, dark corner of space on the far side of the Milky Way.
But Parra may have had a chance to retire after a redemptive World Cup in 2019; while other players, jettisoned in Galthie’s brutally efficient clean sweep, may have been involved in the international set-up a while longer. Some of them may even have been in the mix for this year’s tournament.
What can’t be denied is, under Galthie and his staff, France have climbed back up to number two in the world, have a Grand Slam, and are among the favourites for this year’s World Cup. Just never forget that luck played a major role in that rise to grace. And that there were some losers in the process. Parra is just one of them.
“Parra’s greatest fault? Playing at a time when France were disorganised and in disarray”