Laporte the quiet genius behind the French revolution

IT was a masterstroke by the French Federation when in November 1999 they appointed Bernard Laporte as coach of the national team.

Affable and courteous in public, he is a strict disciplinarian behind the scenes and his influence has clearly been all-important in making France serious contenders for the World Cup. They were nothing short of magnificent yesterday and hardly gave away a silly penalty.

When a team is as dominant as France were yesterday, the suspicion is that they were made to look good by the shortcomings of the opposition.

Laporte wouldn't be drawn, simply insisting: "We wanted to see what we could do. We were ready. We took charge of the game. We scored a few tries and towards the end we slackened off a little bit."

Fabien Galthie, the French skipper, made sure to seek out his opposite number, Keith Wood, at the end of the match and to offer his congratulations on a great career.

Galthie also quits at the end of this World Cup and the pair have become such good friends over the years that they jokingly considered setting up a team for recently retired internationals. But on a more serious note, Wood also predicted that Galthie would be raising the William Webb Ellis trophy aloft on Saturday week.

Galthie commented: "We need to do more. We can't say this was more than against Scotland. It went quite fast. We found we were ahead very early and slackened off but the end result is when you prepare well, you get a good result."

As for French vice captain and second-row Fabien Pelous, it was a sweet moment: "We played the game we expected. We trained very hard during the week and prepared very well. We knew how to go about it. We felt we were rehearsing some of the moves we practised all week."

The trouble for France, of course, as they turn to face favourites England has been their tendency to follow a good display with a very poor one.

Laporte appreciates they must be at their best in the Telstra Olympic Stadium next Sunday:

"We are here to win the World Cup. We have the means to win and don't mind who we meet. We will give it all we've got.

"It's difficult to say if everything is perfect. I can't remember everything that went on in the game now, but the more you play the more mistakes you make. If we perform as we did today, we'll be in trouble. All games are different.

"Today we got ahead of ourselves and could already see ourselves in the semi-finals because of the score, but next time we'll have to do better over the eighty minutes. We did everything we could to stop the Irish in the first half when our defence was excellent."