You have to imagine the sommelier was fairly run off his feet on the January night in Paris, in 1984, when the Ireland and France players met for their postmatch banquet. The contest had resulted in the usual French victory, but that didn’t prevent the president of the French Rugby Federation at the time, Albert Ferrasse, from calling out Jean-Pierre Garuet, the uncompromising Lourdes prop, for his “imbecilic” action in getting himself sent off that afternoon.
The speeches went on, the wine flowed and then Jean-Pierre Rives, the France captain, stood up and grandly announced that Garuet was, in fact, “a loyal team-mate” and dedicated the victory to him, receiving a round of applause.
As it turned out that was Rives’s final season for France: a ruined shoulder put paid to a rugby life in which he established himself as a hard-as-nails, bloody-minded openside flanker but also become a kind of living symbol for everything that was and is supposedly different about French rugby. Blond haired, ridiculously light even then for a secondrow player, furious in the tackle and unashamedly wedded to the belief that rugby was more than merely a game – that it was both a brotherhood and a dream state – Rives was a one-off.
When he retired he didn’t look twice at the conventional postrugby life of golf and moneyology, instead reinventing himself as a sculptor – he twists metal into beauty, much like on the field – and decamping to San Francisco, putting just enough kilometres between himself and his myth.
He rarely spoke about the game but did make himself available for one of the more unusual books of recent years, Richard Escot's Rugby & Art, in which he riffs on just about every subject known to man, including Ireland, the only other country he reckons he would have enjoyed playing for.
“If I had not been born French, I would have been happy to represent Ireland. I like the tragic, their empathy, their taste for all things larger than life. In fact, I have a real weakness for them. Their dramatic fighting spirit. More than fondness, I feel a certain kind of admiration. If I hadn’t been born French, I would have been very happy to be Irish.”
Rives was an enforcer on the field and the scourge of opposition big men, but it was the three-quarters line that held his fascination: he never quite got over his deep-down wish to be a Jo Maso, a Gareth Edwards: “the attitude, the elegance, they are the really gifted players capable of doing anything. And intelligent.”
There is no disputing that a high point of the dismal winters of the 1980s – and perhaps of civilisation itself – was a lit fire on early kick-offs in Paris when Nigel Starmer-Smith or Bill McLaren became lost in admiration whenever the French backs – Sella, Charvet, Lagisquet, Lafond, Bonnevale, Blanco; always Blanco – took a notion to run the ball. Just to see what would happen. France rugby teams seemed helpless then against their own wild mood swings, moving between violence and beauty from moment to moment.
In Pat Collins’s documentary on Frank O’Connor there’s a terrific moment when the American writer Richard Ford is reading a line from an O’Connor story and then breaks away to look at the camera and marvel: “He was making it up as he went along.”
And that was France rugby in a nutshell: they seemed to be inventing it in the moment as they ghosted through the mortal, step-too-slow defences of England, Ireland, addled Wales and ultrapale Scotland. Not for them the dreary reliability of rehearsed moves run and rerun 1,000 times, until the coach was satisfied they worked, but a kind of blind instinct and trust that if they just passed and ran they would arrive at the other end of the field in a magical blur of elusiveness and unorthodox passing. It was imagination unfolding before the tens of thousands of fans, and it hasn’t been bettered in the game for pure enjoyment.
Even 30 years on from Rives’s farewell season the idea persists of French rugby as separate, even if it feels like wishful thinking just now. Still this weekend is an odd and potentially treacherous assignment for an Ireland rugby team for whom the drum beats are resoundingly confident. They aren’t so much expected to go into the Stade de France and boss this game as practically obliged to thereby set up a coup de theatre against England, in Dublin, on St Patrick’s Day.
It’s not hard to see how and why France have slowly become lost in the professional era. The cash-rich clubs call the shots; the domestic teams are flooded with imported stars; the structures for emerging talented players were neglected: the national team has become derailed and distracted.
Philippe Saint-André, one of the sprites of that thrilling era, and France head coach from 2012 to 2015, said recently that “our system killed a generation of players from 17 to 26.” When France shocked everyone by winning the bid to host the 2023 Rugby World Cup, they painted a bleak forecast for the international game to back their case. Claude Atcher argued that the French bid can give World Rugby the serious financial injection needed to prevent the game from dying out in a decade, as most unions are losing money. “If we don’t do anything, in five to 10 years you will have two, three to four teams on the same level and that’s all, and I think rugby will die.”
If it was a scare tactic it worked.
Right now, this weekend, with a teenager playing number 10 for France, with its federation’s president, Bernard Laporte, under police investigation, with just three wins out of 11 last year, with a new coach, with no Six Nations or grand-slam title since 2010, everything is pointing to French vulnerability.
These opportunities don’t come very often. It is only a matter of time before the French get their act together and field international teams reflective of their potential. And, of course, they can’t ever be as cavalier and freewheeling as the France teams of two and three decades ago. Every era believes it is the era of enlightenment. But, three decades from now, rugby fans may look back at this period as a time when players were criminally overworked and their welfare and health terribly neglected, and when all joy and spontaneity were coached out of the game.
Rugby is a business, a professional entertainment as well as a sport, and right now the rugby we see on the field is defined by the vision of the coaches rather than of those who play it. And it works: if Joe Schmidt’s Ireland aren’t exactly the most thrilling team to watch, they are rigorously and brilliantly organised – and they are pros. They are ranked third in the world.
Logic dictates that those qualities will prevail – and if France go out to just play the percentages in a normal, rehearsed game of rugby, then they probably will.
What will be interesting, though, is if the French can summon some of the wild chanciness and instinct and hauteur that used to make playing rugby in Paris such a terrifying prospect for visiting teams. And rugby had better hope that spirit is still in the French DNA. Because if that flame is gone from rugby, then what is left?
