Rugby World Cup: Human spirit overcomes book of rules

EVEN IN their darkest days, the French rugby team have always been able to do six impossible things before breakfast. This year had been particularly gloomy by their standards.

Apart from their disastrous Five Nations' Championship and their subsequent matches in the summer, they had not had an especially impressive World Cup. Au contraire, as they say. They had been lucky to beat Fiji. Against Argentina they managed to do one or two impossible things in the first quarter but then settled for a hard-fought win.

In this column last week I wrote that by late Sunday afternoon I expected to find my investment of pounds 100 in France (tax added) down the plug-hole. At 12.30 at Waterloo Station I cheered up a little. It might just be, I thought, that France would be able to pull it off.

The reason lay solely in the weather. Saturday had been a beast of a day, a Wednesday-night-at-Sardis-Road sort of day. How Steve Larkham contrived to drop a goal from 45 metres in those conditions was amazing.

But Sunday was a day of benign late autumn sunshine more common in South- west France than in this country, even though October was a lovely month this year. On Sunday, as the sun warmed the glass roof of the station, we might almost have been at the Gare Matabiau in Toulouse.

This optimism persisted until Johah Lomu's second try and a scoreline of 24-10 to New Zealand. Well, that was that, I thought. The Kiwis would coast to the victory which everybody had said was inevitable.

There followed half an hour of the most astonishing rugby that most people had ever seen. On this occasion the French did six impossible things after lunch.

It was a triumph of the human spirit over the book of rules, of the Mediterranean over the dark forests: for if the Germans played rugby - it is perhaps fortunate for the rest of us that they have not yet taken up the game - they would surely try to play like New Zealand.

And yet there was nothing mysterious about the win. The French assistant coach, Pierre Villepreux, was quoted afterwards as saying that the plan was to deny New Zealand possession. This may have been so up to a point. But the French disorientated New Zealand as they did because they made their opponents go backwards.

That was why Josh Kronfeld had what was, by his standards, such an ineffectual match. He is used to lurking in what is almost an offside position, living his life on the verge of legality. When his team are going forward, as they usually are, he can plausibly appear before our admiring eyes as a law-abiding citizen.

But when his team are going backwards, as they were for most of Sunday afternoon, he is exposed - I write in rugby terms only, you understand - as something of a confidence artist. The corollary was that his opposite number, Olivier Magne, had a tremendous afternoon.

The French were able to demoralise the New Zealanders in this fashion by the use of two devices: one, the old-fashioned and for some reason now rather despised long kick to the corner, and the other, the short kick ahead over the defensive line. The player who employed these devices was Christophe Lamaison, the French outside-half, and the most underestimated performer in the tournament so far. His kicking throughout the afternoon was impeccable.

It is no use employing the short kick ahead if you are simply giving possession away to the other side. But the French have backs who are fast enough to turn this ploy to their advantage. Indeed, they probably have the fastest backs in the entire World Cup. The fullback Xavier Garbajosa and the centre Emile Ntamack (who does not like playing in that position) are themselves international wings.

And how many other players outside France would have got to the ball which Philippe Bernat-Salles reached to score France's final try? In an earlier match Steve Smith, the sage of the Sale saloon bar, referred to the French wing as a "stroppy little Frenchman". I am fairly sure that Smith, fine scrum- half as he was in his day - he was a better scrum-half than he is a commentator - would not have got anywhere near that ball, anymore than, say, Gareth Thomas or Dafydd James of Wales would have done today.

So justice of a sort has been achieved. The two most attractive major teams in the competition, France and Australia, are to meet in the final. Whether this of itself is enough to turn the rugby World Cup into the success it should have been from the beginning is far more doubtful.