For 114 minutes it hung in the balance. The French resembled a drunk leaning against the door of his home with a key in his hand, the Paraguayans an unwanted party guest who hadn't got the message that it was finally time to go. Then Laurent Blanc put everything back in its proper place with a goal that carried the hosts into the quarter-finals. And a step closer to becoming world champions?

Well maybe, but they'll have to do an awful lot better than this.

The truth is that having apparently made fools of us all over the course of their three group outings with nine goals scored by a team that, the story went, wouldn't be able to find the net, the French almost ended up looking pretty stupid themselves yesterday.

With four players committed to attack they struggled rather ineptly to break down a Paraguayan side that proved once again that they knew how to kill off a game when they wanted to. And only when the South Americans began, tentatively, to look for a way of winning a contest they were better placed to take than they thought did Aime Jacquet's side finally find a way through.

Blanc finished with a golden goal that stopped the game dead in the 24th minute of extra time well and the build up had been good, with David Trezeguet heading Robert Pires's cross neatly into his team-mate's path. But it will take a lot more than that to restore this French side's credibility as serious challengers. It will, to be precise, take a win over the Italians in Saint Denis next Friday afternoon. A prospect Cesare Maldini is unlikely to be quite so concerned about now as he might have been before yesterday afternoon's kick-off.

So creative against weak group opponents, France's shortcomings were obvious and manifold yesterday. Jacquet, who actually said afterwards that he was happy with the performance, must privately have despaired as he watched the likes of Bernard Diomede, Thierry Henry and even Youri Djorkaeff being out-thought and out-played by Paulo Cesar Carpeggiani's tightly organised defence.

Like movie secret service men the Paraguayans flung themselves between anything dangerous and Jose Luis Chilavert and though the French enjoyed long spells of possession well inside their opponents' half, the 32-year-old goalkeeper had precious few real saves to make, the most challenging coming after 101 minutes when Djorkaeff's free took a deflection and the Paraguayan captain did remarkably well to push the ball wide.

By the time the goal arrived the French, like many in the stands may have beginning to suspect that Chilavert's entire career had been building up towards just the sort of opportunity that a penalty shoot out would have provided him with yesterday. "I thought we would have had the better chance if we had got that far," admitted Carpeggiani afterwards and few would have disagreed.

That may have been just the threat that forced the hosts into lifting their game because for more than 100 minutes they looked entirely bereft of the creativity to carve out clearcut chances within a dozen yards of the Paraguayan goal.

Still missing the suspended Zinedine Zidane, Jacquet appeared to play the wrong Arsenal midfielder with his team missing the sort of running from deep positions that Patrick Vieira might have provided had he been involved, and benefiting little from Emmanuel Petit's only occasionally effective ball-winning game in the centre.

Early on the full backs, Lilian Thuram and Bixente Lizarazu looked a likely source of supply but in the space between them the aerial battle was being lost in a hectic penalty area where Carlos Gamarra was emerging as the star of the show.

Had the Paraguayans had an efficient striker themselves then there is no telling what might have happened. But the man they left up front throughout, Jose Cardozo, is certainly not one of those (it would also be an interesting project for a resourceful researcher with generous grant aid behind them to try to discover whether he has ever dispossessed anybody during his career) while the much trickier looking Miguel Benitez seemed to have too much else on his plate to give finding the net anything close to his full attention.

Still, the South Americans did have their chances. Not nearly so many as the French, of course, but some pretty good ones all the same and if, after 56 minutes, Gamarra had turned Francisco Arce's right-flank free another foot to his left then France might this morning have been deep in the throes of a nationwide huff.

As it happens they're not and they'll certainly console themselves with the thought that nobody, certainly not the Italians are going to defend the way this lot did. Crucially, though, we're back to where we were a couple of weeks ago with Les Bleus. Are they good enough to win it? Oh sure, in just about every department with a bit to spare. But where, oh where, are the goals to come from? They've bluffed us once. On Friday afternoon it's time to answer the question for real.