L’agony! France in despair after World Cup exit – but Paris party can reignite rugby
From Calais to Cannes, there was a feeling that, like the football World Cup team in 1998, this was finally the time for Les Bleus. But despite the bitter disappointment of that extraordinary quarter-final exit, Harry Latham-Coyle finds there’s plenty hope that the final fortnight won’t fizzle out without the pyrotechnics this thrilling tournament has delivered in spades
Even the skies are sorrowful. On Wednesday morning the heavens opened, the pitter patter on Paris pavements a strange, solemn sound after a month-and-a-half in which this Rugby World Cup had basked in sunshine. As the two semi-finals move closer, the forecast grows grimmer – after France’s exit at the hands of the Springboks on Sunday, the clouds and a rugby nation weep.
Welcome to a Paris party to which the hosts are no longer invited. After a thrilling quarter-final weekend, one that it would not be an overstatement to describe as this ailing sport’s greatest ever, the World Cup woke up on Monday morning confronting a future without the home side, the tournament’s final fortnight stripped of the partisan popularity that could have brought that extra va-va-voom.
At a brasserie on Tuesday evening, our group asked a canoodling couple if we might sit at the table next to them? “Yes,” came the reply, muttered over a consolatory carafe of vin rouge. “As long as you’re not South African.”
Antoine Dupont’s visage still adorns billboards around the city, a partnership with rail company SNCF ensuring continued prominence on public transport. But in the city of the Mona Lisa, there is no doubt that the new face of the nation is sans smile. L’Equipe had three journalists devoted entirely to following home hopes; the trio are now drowning their sorrows on holiday.
Privately, the hope was that this World Cup could be something akin to the football version of 1998, won by the hosts with a glorious final victory over defending champions Brazil at the Stade de France. That triumph united a complex sporting and political nation – there was a sense of something similar here.
The far right had attempted to muscle in on that success. After the opening win over New Zealand, weekly magazine Valeurs Actuelles produced a rugby-focussed issue giving Dupont and actor Jean Dujardin, a star of the opening ceremony, front page prominence. It angered Dujardin, who wrote on Instagram: “Yes to La France Rugby, no to your values. Please, no political co-opting.” Dupont, having previously signed a letter calling on the electorate to reject Marine le Pen, reposted the message.
Those tensions aside, success of the French men’s national side before this tournament swelled support right around this country. A record 16.5 million viewers watched the quarter-final defeat on TF1, while more still would have filled bistrots and bars to tune in given the fixture’s pride of place in the plum Sunday night spot. From Calais to Cannes, in France’s rugby heartlands and beyond, the public had got behind the team.
Not all are totally au fait – take the Parisian taxi driver who asked if “Australia’s All Blacks” were going to win the tournament – but this World Cup so far has been met with anything but a Gallic shrug. The average attendance across all games is close to 50,000 – the atmosphere at Italy vs Uruguay in Nice was outstanding, and reports from Portugal’s thrilling win over Fiji suggested that the Stade de Toulouse was bouncing.
To what extent can that sort of support be maintained during this final fortnight as France contemplates a last-eight disappointment? World Rugby and the tournament organising committee expressed no concern when questioned by The Independent, though conceded that the hosts’ exit had left a “bitter taste”.
“France may not be with us on the field moving forward, but France is here in the stands, in the rugby villages and in the host cities, continuing to support this remarkable Rugby World Cup,” said tournament director Michel Poussau.
“Their love for the tournament beyond Les Bleus is strong. 9.4 million in France tuned in on Saturday night to watch Ireland v New Zealand making it the best audience of the year without France playing. We saw that, too, when 47,000 fans watched Namibia v Uruguay in Lyon.”
There is a similar sense of loss surrounding Ireland’s exit, their fans’ “Zombie”-fication of the Stade de France having brought the French capital to life over the last month and a half. September was the busiest month for both the Eurostar and Dublin Airport in history. A local journalist on Wednesday made an enquiry to officials on how this might impact upon beer sales both in stadia and elsewhere in the city – the restaurateurs and bar owners in Paris have enjoyed the luck of the Irish.
There was a surge in offloading activity on the official resale platform in the hours after Ireland’s defeat to New Zealand, the green army shedding themselves of tickets turned trifles by the quarter-final defeat.
Who will fill the void they leave? Organisers report an average of 500-600 resold tickets a day for both semi-finals, with Argentina’s brilliant fans adding a much-needed dash of colour in Ireland’s absence. There is still a chance that some seats are left empty on Friday and Saturday evening, with hospitality packages yet to sell out.
Will there be a mass Channel crossing, too? The relative paucity of performances that England have produced in the last few years means that the surge in support that might usually accompany the securing of a semi-final berth has not yet, anecdotally, occurred. But that will, surely, change if Steve Borthwick’s unfancied squad disprove the notion that they are Perkin Warbeck pretenders to the rugby throne.
The fear is that, after two instant classics at the Stade de France in the last eight, this weekend’s mismatched semi-finals haven’t a hope of living up to the lofty billing. A wet weekend further makes it harder to dispel the notion of a dampening of squibs just as the fireworks should be beginning.
All involved in the game have talked about this tournament as a shop window in which rugby needs to dazzle. It is a game stalked both by head injury crises and grim financial tidings, whose very future may rest on both regenerating and attracting new interest over the next five years. The hope is that the final four can provide the pyrotechnics to reignite the city of light – rugby cannot really afford this World Cup to fizzle out.
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