Rugby World Cup 2023: Underdogs New Zealand play mind games ...

STADE DE FRANCE — France are late.

It seems like an uncharacteristic start to their last day of training before Friday’s Rugby World Cup opener against New Zealand. After all, this is a team run by Fabien Galthie, a famous disciplinarian, with surly Wiganer and defence coach Shaun Edwards his trusted lieutenant.

It appears though that even Edwards and Galthie’s uncompromising ways cannot compel Parisian traffic and coach drivers. Their captain’s run training session started 35 minutes behind schedule and their press conference was cut short.

But this is their World Cup, and France can do what they want.

They have yet to win it though. Many have tried to fathom what different brilliant French sides have lacked in previous years. Hosts of a World Cup for the second time, they are the only country ever to have played a final (three in total) and never won one. It must loom large in the mind of every player pulling on the jersey.

“I’m not sure we can measure the impact of past games,” says Raphael Ibanez, who captained France in the 1999 final and now serves as their general manager.

“They are subjects that were briefly studied and touched upon with the group. The conclusion is that there’s not a lot of lessons to learn from the past because actually history today is to be written for this generation, for this group.”

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Perhaps Ibanez had been perusing a copy of L’Equipe before the captain’s run. France’s biggest sports newspaper on Thursday featured a dramatic double front page proclaiming “Our colours, our history”, excitedly building up to the latest installation in this “mythical rivalry” with New Zealand.

“Each competition has its own history,” Ibanez added.

“But everything we’ve put on the table [in the past] will not necessarily have any impact on tomorrow’s game.”

Dan Carter sees it differently. The golden boy of New Zealand rugby, he led his team to home RWC glory in 2011, but it was only painful quarter-final defeat to France in 2007 that helped him learn how to deal with the pressure that was heaped upon him before the All Blacks beat, guess who, the French to claim the title.

“I was playing some of the best rugby in my career and in 2005, 2006, 2007 leading into the World Cup. I felt great, young and I thought it was all just going to happen,” Carter tells i.

“I didn’t realise you know how unique and special these World Cups are and how things don’t always go your way.

“I probably didn’t deal with the pressure in ways that I learned to deal with later in my career: controlling my mind, my emotions, being in real control of the game. I was still young and kind of fearless and just kind of going with it. That quarter-final was a real slap in the face.”

Have France had enough slaps to learn to deal with that pressure? For all that Ibanez can shrug it off, his team cannot ignore what is going on in front of them, especially when New Zealand head coach Ian Foster went out of his way to point it out.

“This is my third World Cup. I’ve never seen a build up for a game like this one. I’ve never seen people put so much on it,” Foster said.

“I think the fact that it’s a home nation who’ve got strong expectations of winning it. The public have got strong expectations of winning it and it’s against a team that I sense the public has a lot of respect for – so it’s well scripted.

“There’s a lot of pressure on them.”

It comes from the very top too. French president Emmanuel Macron’s incredibly controversial pension reforms, which triggered national protests, strikes and even riots across the country, were introduced last week having been forced through earlier this year without a vote in parliament.

The president is keen for the rugby team to take some of the heat off him, and even stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Galthie and captain Antoine Dupont in a huddle on Monday to address the French team and did little to alleviate the sense of pressure.

“You are at home with 67 million French people behind you,” Macron said.

But France is not so unified behind at least one of coach Galthie’s decisions after he called up Bastien Chalureau to replace the injured Paul Willemse. Chalureau was given a suspended prison sentence in 2020 “acts of violence committed because of the victim’s race or ethnicity” after an attack on two men after a night out. He admitted the assault but denied the racist element and is in the process of appealing the verdict.

“I am not a racist, I do not have those values,” he tearfully told a press conference on Monday.

“What I want to say to you is that I confessed to my mistakes, that I paid my debts and I deny all claims about racist remarks.”

His selection has drawn criticism from political groups and former players, most notably former France captain Thierry Dusautoir, who was born in Cote d’Ivoire and is half-Ivorian.

But Chalureau is not in the 23 for Friday night and if France win and go on a roll, nobody will be talking about him or any other chinks in the armour on Saturday morning. Lose, and France will be under an even bigger microscope.