SPIRO: France defeat England with a brilliant 'le finish'

I watched a replay of the France versus England match in the opening round of the 2014 Six Nations tournament before having my breakfast and was thrilled with the quality and intensity of the play.

France scored the first and last try, opening with one after only 32 seconds of play.

France then scored its last try with only with minutes of play left, with a hooker Dimitri Szarzewski running and passing like an inside centre and a youngster Gael Fikou selling a dummy and scoring under the under the posts.

The try and the conversion gave France a well-deserved victory over England, 26-24. People will be talking about this ‘le finish’ for a long time.

This was sport in the Andrew Denton tradition of ‘Shakespeare on steroids’. The steroids, of course, being a metaphor for the intensity and power of the drama on the field and nothing to do with the actual training regime of the players.

You couldn’t get a more exciting and enthralling sporting contest. On the high that comes from watching something memorable in sport, I then made a cup of tea and read through the online sports section of thetelegraph.com.au.

This was a big mistake. My eye caught this headline: “If Sam Burgess turns his back on league the sky won’t quite have fallen in”.

The author of the piece was James Hooper, a rugby league tragic who is bizarrely allowed/required by his newspaper to write about rugby union as well as league.

Anyway, the gist of Hooper’s piece is that it is somewhat of a worry for the NRL that Sonny Bill Williams, Benji Marshall and now, seemingly, Sam Burgess are prepared to go across to the rugby game.

The only attraction that rugby could have for them, apparently, is that there is more money in it than in league: “As much as rugby union can be a complete yawn-fest with all its pedantic penalties and rule interpretations, it’s impossible to ignore the global and financial appeal of the sport”.

Hooper goes on to predict that if Burgess does play rugby that he will become a ‘legend’ in the history of English rugby.

The presumption behind this nonsense is that league players are so much better and fitter athletes than rugby players that someone like Burgess, a league stand out, will totally dominate his rah-rah opponents

I will make a fearless prediction here. If Burgess does play rugby, he will be a journeyman player, at best.

In rugby terms he is an extremely limited player. He can’t pass and his tackling is thuggishly illegal most of the time.

He can barge forward with some effectiveness from time to time but he has no ball skills.

He is no Brad Thorn. Let’s remember, Thorn is the only great league forward who has made the transition to being a great rugby union forward.

There is one other thing I want to say about Hooper’s article. It is high time Sydney rugby league tragics, posing as reporters and pundits (Phil Gould, for instance), stopped their incessant bagging of the rugby game.

The dirty secret of Sydney sports reporting over the decades is that rugby league-obsessed sports journalists have continually bagged rugby.

I reckon there is something of an inferiority complex about this and the nonsense behind the mantra of ‘the greatest game of all’.

The sports editors, too, over the decades have insisted on anti-rugby pieces from their rugby league writers.

Hooper’s latest piece of nonsense is a case in point.

And they have got stroppy when these weren’t produced or contradicted. Sid Barnes, for instance, lost his (ghosted?) column in The Mirror when he claimed that Ian Kirkpatrick’s All Blacks in the 1960s would monster the great St George rugby league champions.

So I make this pledge to rugby league tragics like Hooper – I’ll stop telling the truth about your game (which I do occasionally, alas) if you stop telling lies about my game.

Now back to the France – England game. Here is the scoring sequence: F5 – E0: F5 – E3: F8 – E3: F13 – E3: F16 – E3: F16 – E8: F16 – E11: F16 – E18: F16 – E21: F19 – E21: F19 – E 24: F26 – E24.

You can see from this sequence that France got away to a splendid start. England found themselves well behind, 16-3, after 20 minutes, just as they did late last year at Twickenham against the All Blacks when they were 17-3 behind.

And just as they did against the All Blacks, England clawed their way back into the match and with 20 minutes remaining, in both Tests, they had established a lead.

Now we come to a weakness in the present England side. In my opinion, Owen Farrell (the son of a rugby league great Andy Farrell who did not become a rugby union legend or even a great player when he switched codes) is a very limited fly half.

When England got the lead, he tried to play field position too much instead of setting the backs on more attacking moves. He doesn’t take the ball to the line, either. And he is a cumbersome rather than a quick runner with the ball in hand.

England lack a quick number seven, as well.  In fact, they tend to play two number sixes. What this means is that there is no link forward when the backs make breaks, especially in the middle of the field.

It is appropriate here to quote an axiom of New Zealand rugby which was drummed into me and thousands of other youngsters when we were learning the game all those many, many, many decades ago: ‘The pace of the forwards is the pace of the fastest forward. The pace of the backs is the pace of the slowest back.’

It is worth remembering when England won the 2003 Rugby World Cup the team’s number seven was Neil Back, a very small forward, well under six feet, but tough and extremely quick around the field.

If England want to win the 2015 Rugby World Cup which will be played on their home territory, they need to find a new Neil Back.

If they do, watch out opposition sides. There is something about this present side, its resilience and its bully-boy confidence, expressed with the frequent calls of ‘hit’em, hit’em’ when they piled into rucks or challenged the high ball, that could be turned into greatness.

France, too, are poised on greatness.

They seem to have a complete side. The forwards are tough and like to rampage with the ball in hand.

Their scrum monstered the England scrum. And the young backs, especially at the beginning and end of the Test, showed pace, hard-shoulders, silky skills and a flair for ensemble rugby, i.e. rugby total.

The glory of the modern rugby game, which admittedly has improved immensely as a spectacle (like rugby league) over recent decades, is the allowance teams now have to run through phase after phase, moving the attack from one point to another, until the decisive break-through is made.

England found to its recent cost that when teams like the All Blacks and now France get their phases going it is extremely difficult to mount an impregnable defensive system.

When this happens, rugby becomes the equivalent of soaring Shakespearean blank verse, passionate, brilliant and overwhelming to the eyes, the mind and the spirit.

This is the great beauty and strength of rugby as a spectacle that teams with the ball can control it and run it for many, many phases of play, for up to two minutes of play and sometimes more as they attack the defence with wave after wave of assaults with the ball in hand.

I shouldn’t say it and I won’t, but come in close while I whisper that none of the other codes (gridiron or league) that have their origins in the rugby union game can produced this sort of splendid ensemble, orchestral magic as play after play is run off in a sequence of skill, passion and high drama.

I have in the past been critical of the Welsh referee Nigel Owens. But in the last year and now as the referee of the splendid France – England Test, he has redeemed himself as one of the best in world rugby.

As with most sports, the efficiency of the match officials, their accuracy and their understanding of the spirit of the game makes a crucial contribution to the way it is played. In many ways, Owens was the man of the match because he was so influential in ensuring that it was a Test that will be remembered and savoured for a long time to come.

Finally, France is coming to Australia for a June series against the Wallabies. Hopefully, they will bring their full-strength side and if they do we’ll be able to see how much progress the Wallabies have made since the lost series against the British and Irish Lions last year.

Vive le rugby-panache!