IT IS an open secret among the international rugby fraternity that the raison d’etre of the game is to provide a fitting stage for the French to remind the rest of us of how helplessly cool they are. New Zealanders may be obsessed with the gentleman’s game and the English claim it as their sport, but there is no point in denying the obvious: rugby was made for the French. It is no coincidence that William Webb Ellis chose the south of France for his final resting place.
In the 1980s, when the backs looked like Romantic era poets and the forwards looked horrendously hung-over, the rugby relationship between Ireland and France was clear-cut and cordial. Every second year, hundreds of Gallic rugby fans would take to the streets of Dublin to knock back as much stout as St James’s Gate could brew, pilfer whatever decent seafood was on offer in the city and then set about ooh-la-la-ing the Irish women on a Friday night.
Vainly – but chicly – they would wander the streets, all of them smoother than Alain Delon as they sought out Dublin’s premiere – and indeed only – nightclub. “Ou est le Elephant Rose?” they would enquire, intent of relieving the place of its best and worst champagne. Then they would turn up on a frigid afternoon at Lansdowne Road, cognac in pocket and cockerel on show, to watch their urbane and stylish backs run riot against an Irish defence doing its best impression of the Maginot Line.
They liked us, mainly because we permitted them to run home lots of tries and the brass band performed a damn fine version of La Marsellaise. They liked us because even though our players spilled blood and burst arteries on the field of play, we were tremendously sporting about their habit of beating us year-in and year-out.
The visits to Paris were approached some where between fascination and dread. It was very different to the the modern era, when up to half a million Paddies converged on Paris to gorge on foie gras and watch a young Brian O’Driscoll breezily run home three tries. Back in the 1980s, you could literally count the number of Irish folks who could afford to fly to Paris for the away internationals and for those select few, the game was incidental to the weekend and rarely pretty to watch.
This was a time when scoring a try on French soil might well have heralded a day of national celebration in Ireland. It is not like Ireland didn’t have fine rugby players in the 1980s. Indeed, the poet John Montague recorded one of the great Irish rugby anecdotes in a tribute to Samuel Beckett in the Guardian in 1989. He recalled how a journalist, visiting the writer in Paris, casually mentioned he used to play rugby with Ollie Campbell. Beckett immediately brightened and declared that Campbell was a genius and then proceeded to select an all-time 15 of Irish writers. He insisted on picking James Joyce at scrumhalf, his blind-as-a-bat reputation notwithstanding: “Very crafty. Very nippy. He might surprise you when the light is fading.”
When Montague quizzed his companion about how he knew so much about Campbell given he never watched television, Beckett conceded: “Only for the games. And only when the Irish play.”
It wasn’t a bad rule of thumb, for even when Irish teams weren’t winning, they were compelling. There was always a gallant last stand about the manner in which Irish rugby teams used to play against the big nations of England and France. Especially France.
You never really minded losing to France because they always had someone like Jean Pierre Rives to remind you they were French and cool and playing rugby like it was a form of jazz was just what they did. In 1989, it was France’s turn to come to Dublin. By then, Serge Blanco was entering the twilight period of his time as the god of French rugby. The Biarritz fullback took the French obligation to play rugby with sublime skill and coolness to unreasonable heights – and he had good company. He was suave, smiling and, like all patriotic Frenchmen, smoked like a movie star.
The Irish had nobody to compare – at least not since the great Phil Lynott shuffled off (In any case, one imagines the Lizzy front man was more of a Dalymount man). That year in Lansdowne, with Ireland leading the match, Blanco had a kick charged down in his own 22 and faced his own goal with half the Irish pack bearing down on him. The French launched an insolent counter attack that brought them deep into Irish territory in a series of mesmerising, unstoppable fast-slow passes which ended with Blanco running under the Irish posts unopposed. All the old suspects were there: Sella, Berbizier, Mesnel and Lagisquet.
One can make arguments for Bastille Day or Brigitte Bardot or Notre Dame or Serge Gainsbourg or Proust or Zidane, but the sight of Patrice Lagisquet running at full tilt with ball in hand showed off the essence of being French just as well as the mightiest monument or priceless work of art. Back then, when Bill McLaren or Fred Cogley or Nigel Starmer-Smith announced the name “Lagisquet”, their voices quivering with menaced expectation, it was the surest thing in the world that a try was seconds away.
They used to call Lagisquet “The Bayonne Express”. But that comparison never meant much to those of us accustomed only to Irish rail transport. Moss Keane we may have understood in terms of the Friday evening 5.55 from Dublin to Sligo – sometimes late, undeniably rickety but reliable, brave, loyal to a fault, hard-wearing and unbeatable crack in the bar area. But Lagisquet was never as substantial as a mode of transport. For us, the man was a ghost.
Most of the great French tries seem to have been born from near hopeless situations, when they were forced to attack from behind their own try line or give New Zealand a four-try head start or when they seemed mysteriously bent on executing at least three behind-the-back passes on their way to scoring.
Inevitably, their tries involved great sleight of hand, lacerating speed and geometrically astonishing passes iced with a stunning burst of speed from Saint-Andre, Emile N’Tamack, Bernat-Salle or any of the devastatingly cool speed merchants who have worn the blue down the last 20 years. It would have looked like showing off if any other nation tried it. But the French are cursed with a duty to do everything more beautifully than the rest of us.
We Irish take a different approach. For all of the classy tries Irishmen have scored, for us it still boils down to Ginger McLoughlin grunting and effing his way towards that corner of Twickenham with half a dozen of Eton’s finest hanging out of his family jewels, redressing centuries of colonial oppression.
For a long time, we were content with those odd bursts of glory – Mannion dashing like a sprinter in Cardiff, Nicky Popplewell’s tears, Geoghegan stuffing it to the Charioteers in Twickenham. But then something changed. It could well be that future economists pinpoint the precise dates of the Irish “boom” as those years between Denis Hickie’s intercept try in Paris in 1998 and Vincent Clerc’s late try in Croke Park to thieve the Grand Slam in 2007.
In those nine years, the Irish became accustomed to purchasing fashionable apartments in France, to speaking French, dressing like the French and, most strangely, to playing rugby like the French.
It has meant the relationship between the nations is no longer quite so fond. There has been an edge to this annual date in recent years and although so much about Ireland has so suddenly and incredibly come to resemble the 1980s again, the rugby team has a new and gleaming back line that can move the ball in vintage French fashion.
“It’s cruel,” muttered Tony Ward two years ago when Clerc dissected us for that infamous try, silencing Croke Park and shattering the GAA’s Entente Cordiale with the outside world. In those heady times when we were the epicentre of Europe and Paris was known only as the Dublin of the Continent, he could have added, “c’est sauvage” and nobody would have noticed. So after the darkest winter, a bit of Irish flair this evening – and against the coolest rugby nation on earth – would be a sight for sore eyes all over Ireland. They might surprise us in the fading light.
