There was anger, of course. There always is on the morning after a loss like the one France suffered on Sunday night. And at Le Rugby bistro, on Rue Roquépine in Paris’s 8th district, one of the four old men standing at the bar was venting his. The referee, Ben O’Keeffe, was a fool, he explained again, it had been a deliberate knock on, he repeated. The others, who, you guess, had heard all this from him more than once already, pursed their lips, pulled on their ears and nodded in agreement, silent as Philippe Sella and Didier Camberabero and Pierre Berbizier and all the other old players in the black and white photos on the wall.
Antoine Dupont was right, the man continued, O’Keeffe wasn’t up to it. O’Keeffe, it seems, like all referees, isn’t just there to run the game, but to give the losers someone to blame after it.
There was sadness, of course there was sadness. Not the heavy kind, there is far too much of that around for anyone to feel it about anything as trivial as this. The front pages of the papers folded on the table nearby led with images of the vigil that was held in Arras for the murdered schoolteacher Dominique Bernard. Instead, the sadness was the sort you feel at the end of a party, an unavoidable sense that there was a little less to look forward to, and a little less joy to distract us from all that. It wasn’t something anyone spoke about, but it had settled across the tournament, like the grey clouds that spread over Marseille on Monday morning.
And there was sympathy, for Dupont and all the rest of them, who have, between them, done so much to revive the sport here in the last four years. Under Fabien Galthié, France’s run at the World Cup had become something close to a national project. The beautiful idea at the heart of it may only have been an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of all those victories, but still. It was so powerful that when Galthié called up Bastien Chalureau, who is appealing against a conviction of a racially motivated assault on two fellow players, Emmanuel Macron himself felt he had to give Galthié a reminder of just how significant the decision was.
Macron was caught talking to Galthié during a visit to see the team at their training ground. “We must not have any controversies,” Macron told him. That conversation showed how high the stakes were for the French teams these last few weeks, but in the end, the significance of it lay more in what Chalureau’s selection said about their waning chances of winning them. Galthié often talks about destiny, in the way, perhaps, that only a bespectacled French rugby coach can. It was the word he used to describe France’s grand slam victory in the Six Nations last year, and again in the run-up to this tournament.
But there has been a growing sense that this wasn’t going to be France’s moment after all. You could feel it coming on when Romain Ntamack ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament three weeks before the tournament, which didn’t just cost France their starting fly-half, but also his instinctive partnership with his inseparable friend, and clubmate, Dupont. It got worse when they had to call up Chalureau to replace Paul Willemse, the biggest and most bloodthirsty of all their forwards. Willemse is a one-man wrecking crew, exactly the sort of player you might send in to clear out a den of Springboks. He and Ntamack had started almost every recent match that mattered.
So there was some ruefulness at the hand fate played. But more than that, there was, a measure of phlegmatic acceptance. As Galthié said “over the last four years we have achieved something great, so no regrets, we were entitled to lose the way we did.”
The party may all have ended a little sooner than everyone hoped but it had been a hell of a bash while it lasted. And as one of the other men drinking at the bar of Le Rugby said, once he’d had his fill of his friend’s bellyaching, “that’s sport”. And besides, the barman chipped in, “it was a grand match”. The other four nodded at that. It was, they agreed, a grand match.
