Antoine Dupont: World’s greatest determined to make every play count

Top 14 sides, Castres and Biarritz, for example, will confirm that it takes just a second’s mental slip, and Antoine Dupont - and the game — has gone.

CALLING THE SHOTS: The rugby-watching world knows Toulouse’s Antoine Dupont is hugely talented, but he understands that talent demands hard work, discipline, and self-control. Picture: Dan Mullan/Getty Images

It may be a heresy, but Antoine Dupont is human after all.

He had an ordinary game by any top-flight player’s standards, let alone his own, as Toulouse lost 17-7 at Bordeaux on Saturday.

Victory merely needed a perfect defensive gameplan, in which Bordeaux defenders busted a gut to hammer every breakdown and stifle every attack at source — and Louis Picamoles in a modern Serge Betsen seek-and-destroy role, with Dupont as his sole target.

There’s plenty that Champions Cup opponents, looking for clues to beat the European and Top 14 title holders, could take from analysing Saturday’s result, as well as Toulouse’s loss at Lyon in October, mostly on the levels of concentration and commitment required.

Other Top 14 sides, Castres and Biarritz, for example, will confirm that it takes just a second’s mental slip, and Dupont - and the game — has gone.

The smarts to see what’s on before anyone else; the speed, the strength and the nerve to carry it out, is what sets the 25-year-old Toulousain, a pin-up on the walls of young players dreaming of a world of heads-up attacking rugby, apart.

The list of awards and accolades Dupont has won this year alone is mind-blowing. He was the first French player to be named Six Nations Player of the Year. He’s also European Player of the Year; and has won Midi Olympique’s French player of 2021 award. Rugby World magazine listed him number one in their Top 100 of the year — he was 47th on their last list in 2019; and he deserves his place as one of four on World Rugby’s otherwise strange shortlist for Player of the Year.

But the plaudits go beyond gongs and photos of a slightly embarrassed young man looking slightly out of sorts, clutching this trophy or that, in a suit he wouldn’t normally wear. Aaron Smith lauded him on Twitter in February, describing him as “the point of difference for both his club and country”.

On the eve of the All Blacks’ match against France in Saint-Denis last month, Jordie Barrett said: “Dupont [is] the life of [the France] team. He’s a world-class nine, and he dictates a lot of their play. If we can stifle a lot of things he wants to get done in the game, we’ll go a long way to winning it.”

New Zealand, unlike Bordeaux and Lyon, were unable to stifle him — or France — and lost 40-25, a week after losing to Ireland.

“I was very touched, almost embarrassed, that someone with the career Smith has had… would say that about me,” Dupont told The Daily Telegraph earlier this year. “It gives me even more motivation to work, to train and to be even better.”

That comment says a lot about him. This one says more. Just before France’s Six Nations win in Dublin last February, team-mate Brice Dulin said: “Every match, [Dupont] creates things and often he disrupts opposing defences on his own. He is always one step ahead.”

So far, so normal. But Dulin then let slip Dupont’s great non-secret that belies the instinctive way he plays.

“It’s [down to] really hard work. Nothing happens by chance. He’s a huge worker.”

The rugby-watching world knows Dupont is hugely talented. He knows it — he’s hardly deaf or blind to the adulation — but he understands that talent demands hard work, discipline, and self-control, otherwise it gets wasted.

There’s a reason his heroes as a young player in darkest Auch, not far from Toulouse, were Jonny Wilkinson, Dan Carter, Brian O’Driscoll, and Freddie Michalak. They are fixed points in the rugby firmament where ability meets graft.

It helps that he’s quiet and diffident off the pitch and sensible enough to realise this great career too will pass.

While busy setting the rugby world alight, he also studied for a Masters in sports management, graduating in 2020. “You can’t see it on the pitch, but he’s very shy, he keeps a low profile,” Beatrice Jantore, in charge of high-level athletes at the Toulouse School of Management, told regional newspaper Ouest France.

Adrien Leitao, a former fellow student, added: “The first day of classes, in the lecture theatre, he stood alone in a corner so that no one would notice him.”

It’s telling, too, that his career choices have kept him close to his home village of Castelnau-Magnoac, in the Hautes-Pyrénées, where he and his brother have recently bought renovated and reopened the hotel that once belonged to his grandparents and was known for its Michelin-starred restaurant. They has big plans for the place — but the biggest is when this rugby lark is over, he gets to go home and lay down roots.

Dupont is a product of the same FC Auch-Gers ecole de rugby as Toulouse team-mate Anthony Jelonch, and La Rochelle’s Pierre Bougarit and Gregory Alldritt.

It was there his talents first shone. The story goes that, aged 10, he moved up an age grade so that he wouldn’t get bored with the lack of challenge and switch to football.

After he had guided the U18s side — known as the Crabos — to the national title, he left Auch, aged 17, to join Top 14 side Castres on an academy contract.

Leinster were the first senior side to get sight of him, when he came on as a replacement 10 minutes from time during a Champions Cup pool match, in October 2014. The Irish side, on a run to the semi-finals, won 21-16.

His first start came the following January, against Harlequins in the same competition. He was a rare point of light in that match, in that season, for a struggling Castres’ side and ended up playing 11 times in his debut season.

In 2015, Dupont, just 18, played second fiddle to Toulon’s Anthony Meric in France’s U20s set-up under Fabien Pelous. He played three Six Nations matches, all as substitute, and was not selected for the world championship that year.

He went to Japan with the U20s the following year, scoring five tries in three matches.

Then his career trajectory turned sharply upwards. He was named on a France player development list, was a substitute in the French Barbarians’ squad that beat Australia in Bordeaux, won his first cap and then his first start in the 2017 Six Nations, toured South Africa, swapped Castres for Toulouse, and was named player of the match for his performance in defeat against New Zealand, opposite Smith, in the November internationals.

A cruciate ligament injury in the 2018 Six Nations against Ireland paused his rise for more than half a year. He returned to action in October, was a substitute in all three November internationals and — after Morgan Parra questioned then-coach Jacques Brunel’s tactics following the humiliating defeat against England at Twickenham — got his hands back on the nine jersey. He’s had first refusal on it ever since.

On top of that, he’s won two Top 14 titles with Toulouse, in 2019 and 2021, and the Champions Cup. But that’s not enough. Winning drives him. The late loss to England at Twickenham in this year’s Six Nations was particularly galling. He believes, with a little more control, France would have won that match, and ended another losing streak.

“When I have regrets, when I know that I could have done better, I also remember that’s what allows us to improve, to never be satisfied with the level at which we are, that we can always be better in every way,” Dupont said in that Telegraph interview.

Chances are he has regrets, and feels that he could have done better at Bordeaux. Which is probably bad news for Saturday’s Champions Cup opponents Cardiff, not to mention Wasps next weekend — because he likes to make his lessons count.