“We leave nothing to the opponent”… Heroic in defense, the Blues bend but do not break

From our special correspondent in Cardiff,

A final Welsh attack in stoppage time, like an ultimate dose of suffering injected into our little journalistic heart, a bit chauvinistic. A 471st French tackle and a ball that comes out on the right side, extracted by Gaël Fickou, as a good boss of the defense, then thrown into the Taf river which licks the Millennium Stadium. There it’s finished. The Dragons will not break the dream of the French Grand Slam this Friday, as the latter had ruined that of the Leek players last year, at the last second of the last match of the Six Nations Tournament (32-30).

After this success with forceps (9-13), the band of Antoine Dupont must now drive the Englishman out of the Stade de France, on Saturday March 19, to concretize all the good it has done to national rugby for two years, and glean its first laurels in the form of a “Grand Slam”.

This Friday, however, it was with a kind of particular beauty that she won her seventh victory in a row, the fourth in a row against her former Welsh tormentors. No great flights or magical breakthroughs from the best player in the world. Rather a brutal and austere aesthetic, which suits the monk-soldier François Cros. “Character-wise, it was great. We had a big defense tonight, that’s what allows us to win here. »

With his 14 tackles, the 3rd line from Toulouse perfectly illustrates his point. More generally, the French shot at 93% success in the exercise, with even a “perfect” for some like Anthony Jelonch (10 out of 10), also author of the only test of the evening from the 9th minute.

Without fear and without reproach

“We had an attack ball and we scored, it shows the efficiency that we can have, slipped Romain Ntamack at the microphone of France 2 from the final whistle. We leave nothing to the opponent, we give them very few points. »

From the press box, almost level with the lawn, we could see that Gabin Villière’s sinus fracture was well repaired, or that then the Toulon winger was a bit bland when blocking the road of the colossus Faletau . We also thought that we would never have recovered if we had suffered the buffet stop inflicted by the golgoth Paul Willemse on the Welsh full-back Liam Williams.

Dan Biggar’s Halberds

While the rain eased at kick-off in an open-air Millennium, the drops were replaced by the halberds dispatched by Dan “Big Foot” Biggar to test the French defense. Fabien Galthié released the calculator at a press conference. “The match was very tactical, with 36 kicks from them against 28 for us. They tried to push us back with their footwork, so we had a lot of space to cover but we managed to respond. “And in the first place Melvyn Jaminet, finally sovereign under the candles and effective on foot (3 successes out of 4 attempts).

In the air as on the ground, the Welsh have therefore tried everything. But the French wall held on, with just the right amount of luck on this ball inexplicably lost by center Jonathan Davies, a few meters from the in-goal (62nd). “Our game plan almost worked,” grumbled their coach Wayne Pivac after the fact, very sorry after this third failure in four games, which is still a stain for a defending champion.

Thank you Shaun Edwards

But there again, the stats are relentless, and Fabien Galthié, in good Bertrand Renard of rugby, gives a layer. “We managed to win five rucks by being very disciplined, we come out with eight penalties. There was know-how in the tackle, in the way we got into the rucks. »

It’s hard not to think that if Shaun Edwards, head of French defense, had continued to officiate on the Welsh side as he did between 2008 and 2019, the result would have been reversed. But now, the Englishman now lives in Canet-en-Roussillon. And his expertise as well as that of his colleagues delight tricolor fans, who were able to forget a 2010 decade as perky as a German soap opera on public service at the time of the digestive.

This Friday, the Millenium Stadium, like Murrayfield two weeks earlier, looked like a French enclave. Reputed to be hostile to the adversary, the splendid cauldron depopulated due to the delusional tariff policy of the Welsh Fed (63,000 spectators for a capacity of 74,000) had to collect Marseillaise and “Allez les Bleus” repeatedly, and even a humiliating ” We are at home “.

Congratulations to Julien Marchand, elected Man of the Match of this #WALvFRA ????
The French hooker was imperial in the game and is rewarded for his good performance ???? #SixNations2022 pic.twitter.com/6evAJV3YaZ

— Six Nations (FR) (@SixNations_FR) March 11, 2022

Inevitably, this support galvanized the French resistance and its commander-in-chief Julien Marchand (elected man of the match) who again dug like an angry mole to recover hot balls, such as this scraping of the half-hour game, when the adverse pressure was close to unbearable.

It’s hard to imagine that “we saw tonight [vendredi] a team that had been sick, with players who had the flu, covid”, as Galthié said, deprived in Cardiff of Damian Penaud and Romain Taofifenua because of the Omicron variant. All these brave will have deserved well from the homeland when England will have fallen at the Stade de France, next Saturday. Because nothing dreadful can happen to them now.