Peter Bills: French idiotic to guillotine natural flair
In days gone by, France invested a particularly cruel punishment upon those who acted like control freaks, as Citizen Robespierre would doubtless testify.
Alas, the guillotine is no more in France and the bureaucrats, with their endless diktats, run free. More's the pity in the case of French rugby, because the one thing that a series of over-zealous, control-freak coaches has all but terminated is the natural capacity of French rugby players to run free.
It is, so the old saying goes, only a fool who abandons his birthright and its traits. Yet the French seem to have willingly done this, so damagingly, in a game which they once embraced and graced with silken skills.
The likes of Lucien Mias, Jean Prat, Jean Gachassin, Andre Boniface, Jo Maso, Pierre Villepreux and Jean-Pierre Rives are fast becoming a mere memory when set alongside today's representatives.
What makes it worse is that, plainly, such talents still remain -- their skills are just not being used. This piles absurdity on top of absurdity.
In the rush for control, discipline, organisation and structure, the French have jettisoned the great quality that always set them apart from more plodding rivals; namely, unpredictability.
Attempting to second-guess the French and their intentions was traditionally as risky a concept for foreigners as ordering plates of escargot, frog's legs and foie gras in some Paris restaurant.
This ghastly metamorphosis of a glorious national characteristic has taken place in the course of little more than a single decade.
In 1998, I watched mesmerised as a French team cut Wales to shreds in a scintillating 51-0 win at Wembley. It was rugby to make the gods dance in delight and it warmed your soul, like a hot toddy on a cold winter's night.
Yet within a mere handful of years, the French had sacrificed this lethal philosophy forged on an attacking mindset for a dull, altogether more predictable approach.
Of course, it is necessary in the modern game to add a healthy touch of pragmatism to your philosophy. Rugby defences no longer leak like sieves, are no longer as disorganised as a kids' play-group at break time.
Yet even so, it seems to me curious that the French should have so willingly forsaken their roots, the great tradition that was their hallmark.
A classic example of this was to be seen last Sunday afternoon in Edinburgh. The early rugby France played against Scotland was far from dull and predictable. Indeed, there were plenty of attempts in the first half to get the ball through hands, to seek space out wide and profit from it.
Yet we saw after half-time the price France may be paying for its abandonment in the past decade of its age-old skills and focus on attack as opposed to defence.
Ahead by 15-6 at the interval and with the Scots struggling to hold on, France seemed to freeze. Just as you thought they would cut the Scots to pieces with some of those old elegant flourishes, their game atrophied.
Boring
They became boring, predictable and grimly dull. To manage just a sole penalty goal in the entire second half from a position of such ascendancy defied belief.
Now some might suggest this was a dastardly plot, that it was the wily old French cockerel up to his cunning tricks. By taking their foot off the pedal and making so many substitutions, they could rest some key players ahead of the Ireland match this weekend.
If you buy that philosophy, good luck to you. Frankly, I don't. Had the French gone out after half-time at Murrayfield and wiped the Scots away in a blur of attacking, running rugby and scored three or four more tries, wouldn't that have been the best intimidation possible for the Irish team as they prepared for Paris?
Since when was shutting up shop going to frighten anyone? But then, perhaps France have lost the art of destroying teams by their skills with the ball, their vision, their ability to find and create space, plus their timing in releasing the pass and freeing players around them.
We saw just one example of this gift in three Six Nations matches last weekend and it certainly didn't come from a Frenchman. Rather, Brian O'Driscoll's immediate release of the ball, under heavy pressure, ensured that Jamie Heaslip would be freed out wide to score Ireland's first try against Italy.
Exquisite pieces of skill like that, beautiful hands used at high speed and with pinpoint accuracy, used to be routine for the French. But no more.
- Peter Bills
Irish Independent
