Donal Lenihan: French investment in youth already yielding impressive returns
France head coach Fabien Galthie before the 6 Nations match at the Stade de France last month. Picture: PA Wire via MaxPPP.
There's a strange symmetry about Ireland starting and finishing the most bizarre of calendar years with a home game against Scotland.
Taking over the reins of the national side from a head coach with the lengthy list of achievements Joe Schmidt had accumulated is challenging enough at the best of times.
To do so in the midst of a global pandemic has only served to make Andy Farrell’s job even more challenging.
The Autumn Nations Cup was born out of necessity given the inability of our traditional southern hemisphere rivals to travel due to the coronavirus. On the back of the rescheduled Six Nations games that fell foul to Covid-19 back in March, a run of six meaningful Test matches over seven weeks handed Farrell the chance to make up for lost time.
With the final Nations Cup outing to come on Saturday, we will reserve judgment on where this Irish squad is positioned with just over nine weeks to go to the 2021 Six Nations opener against Wales in Cardiff.
Suffice to say, given the pressure Farrell and Wayne Pivac are under at present, that game takes on a huge significance.
Despite the lockdown and a lack of competitive rugby, the international form lines produced the pairing the tournament organisers and broadcasters craved when scheduling the Nations Cup final for a prime-time Sunday afternoon slot.
They will be seething however that France will field a massively understrength match-day squad, short over 20 frontline players, in a move which greatly undermines the integrity of this fledgeling competition.
England and France are, by a stretch, the leading sides in northern hemisphere rugby at present and were only separated in the delayed 2020 Six Nations table on points differential.
Sunday’s decider will not be a true reflection of the current state of play due to a commitment given by the French Federation to their Top 14 clubs that no player will feature in more than three Tests in this expanded autumn international window.
France will be without all their frontline players at Twickenham but, on this occasion, I suspect the visiting management will not be overly concerned.
Every national coach has had to manage the troops and rotate his squad in this window but the forced alterations Fabien Galthie had to make for the game against Italy last Saturday night will do him no harm in the long run.
Retaining only two starters from the side that beat Scotland in Murrayfield the previous weekend, France dipped so far into their reserves, their entire starting pack against Italy had only 13 caps between them.
The fact they overwhelmed a near full-strength Italian side, who actually played some decent rugby, by 36-5 offers a further indication of the talent France are nurturing at present, many of whom were part of their back-to-back U20 World Cup-winning squads in 2018 and 2019.
With so many regulars ruled out due to an arrangement brokered in the offices of the FFR, Galthie and manager Raphael Ibanez may quietly be happy at the excuse to expose so many of the back-up squad to the demands that England will impose before returning to Twickenham for what will be the pivotal game of the 2021 Six Nations tournament next March.
Perhaps the most interesting parallel that can be drawn from the development path being adopted by France and Ireland at present surrounds the search for continuity and depth in the crucial out-half role. For years the French were the architects of their our demise given the regularity with which they chopped and changed their half-backs.
France have always had a conveyor belt of quality at scrum-half but, for some reason, have struggled to find a No 10 with the temperament and game management skills to really drive the team. It hasn’t helped that most lasted about as long in the role as members of Donald Trump’s inner circle.
Galthie, an outstanding scrum-half and former national captain, decided to address that issue head-on when identifying the Toulouse pair of Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack as his first choice partnership for the next World Cup.
They had played eight consecutive games together before being forced to alter that combination due to the FFR arrangement for the Scotland game.
Ntamack is far from the finished article but has blossomed this year in the certainty that he is now first-choice No 10. Still only 21, he has already accumulated 18 caps along with 54 appearances for Toulouse in top-flight rugby.
Backing him up is the equally gifted Matthieu Jalibert, who made his debut against Ireland in the 2018 Six Nations as a 19-year-old. A serious knee injury sustained that night cost him a year on the sideline but he was back as Ntamack’s understudy to win his 6th cap in the 15-22 win over Scotland and backed that up with another solid performance against the Italians on Saturday.
Tucked in behind them is 21-year-old U20 World Cup winner in Louis Carbonel, another French debutant on Saturday night. Despite his age, Carbonal has already made 44 appearances for Toulon, something that will make his transition to the international arena that bit easier. He was so good when France won the 2019 U20 World Cup that Ntamack was picked in the centre.
The Ireland U20 side that won the Grand Slam that year also had two decent No 10s vying for the jersey in Harry Byrne and Ben Healy. Yet only now are they being exposed to regular first-team rugby with Leinster and Munster, by and large, in the Guinness PRO14.
While none of the Ireland U20 side that beat France 31-29 in a sizzling encounter at Musgrave Park two years ago have yet secured a starting place for their provinces in the Heineken Champions Cup, three of their French counterparts have been capped at full international level in Arthur Vincent, Carbonel and loosehead prop Jean-Baptiste Gros.
Incredibly, four of the 2018 World Cup-winning U20 pack have also been capped by Galthie in props Hassane Kolingar and Demba Bamba, second-row Killian Geraci who started against Italy on Saturday night along with another outstanding back-row talent in Cameron Woki who featured regularly off the bench in the Six Nations.
By way of comparison, none of the Irish class of 2019 have been capped with Ronan Kelleher and Caelan Doris the only members of the 2018 squad to make the breakthrough to full international honours.
The scramble to find a successor to Johnny Sexton has being going on for some time. Many have been given the chance but nobody has put any serious pressure on the Ireland captain who remains head and shoulders ahead of any of the current pretenders when one takes the injured Joey Carbery out of the picture.
A very exciting cohort of talented No 10s have come through the under-age system in recent seasons in Byrne, Healy, Conor Fitzgerald and Jack Crowley but none are being exposed to the real cut and thrust of European rugby.
All the while our French counterparts are accelerating the progress of numerous talented young players with club and country. The worry for the rest of us was that, if and when the French got their act together, we had better be ready.
That moment has well and truly arrived. The last consistently successful French national coach was BernardLaporte, now president of the French Federation. Having driven the campaign to win the hosting rights for the 2023 World Cup, Laporte had finally addressed the glaring shortcomings within the national coaching set up, even acknowledging the need for an outside influence with Shaun Edwards now contributing massively on that front.
French now have a coordinated and transparent plan, designed to absorb some pain along the way as they chart their journey towards their overriding goal — winning the William Webb Ellis Cup for the first time after suffering defeats in the inaugural final in 1987, and subsequent deciders in 1999 and 2011.
Their young squad over delivered in the 2020 Six Nations and are ahead of schedule. Whatever the outcome of the game against England next weekend, the French management will have extracted the maximum return from their ever-evolving squad in this international window.
Can the Irish management say the same?
