Boks’ pool opponents ominous but France may have peaked

If Rassie Erasmus and Jacques Nienaber were somewhere on Sunday morning where British newspapers were readily available, and if they were in the habit of reading them over their bacon and eggs, you could imagine them collectively heaving a huge sigh of concern and muttering “Oh dear, this isn’t good!”

There is a lot of excitement in the north about what is happening in the Six Nations and what it might mean for the forthcoming Rugby World Cup in France. And it is not just about Ireland, who emphatically underlined their right to be considered the No 1 team with their strong performance against the world’s No 2 team, France, in Dublin.

Scotland are charging too. Well, at least if you look at the historical perspective. After their great win over England at Twickenham on the opening weekend, the question being asked was the inevitable one about their ability to back up. They had never done so in the Six Nations era, and Wales had often been the team that had brought the Scots back to earth.

SCOTS CHANGING THE NARRATIVE

At least until this past Saturday that was the case. That has changed now, with the Scots having completed the first two games of the competition as winners for the first time since it became the Six Nations. And they didn’t just beat Wales, they hammered them.

It was close until halftime. In fact it was still very much a 50/50 game until the game reached the 50th minute. It was then though that the magic of their flyhalf Finn Russell, and he really is a magician, came to the fore, and once the Scots were more than a score ahead it was no race.

At this point Warren Gatland’s Wales and England, who scored their first win under Steve Borthwick’s coaching but it was against an Italy team that always struggles when beaten at forward, look distinctly average.

If anything Aviva and then Twickenham a day later offered the stark contrasts of modern rugby: The Irish game was a great advert of where the sport should be headed, played at quick tempo and with the players displaying high skill levels, whereas the London clash challenged those of us who struggle with a mild form of narcolepsy that descends on Sunday afternoons.

But England and Wales are not really the Bok coaching duo’s problem. Scotland and Ireland are. They’re both in the same pool as the South Africans. And right now both teams are thriving, with Scotland as comprehensively underlining their right to be in the top 5 as Ireland rolled the drums in favour of their No 1 status.

IRISH THREAT IS MORE THAN JUST HYPE

After watching them devour France in what was a great advert for rugby and hopefully an indicator of where the code is heading, it is no longer possible to just write off the chatter in Ireland as hype. If you balance what was said after the game with the bald statistics of what happened in the game, it brings home just what a threat Ireland have become.

For instance, the French, and the commentators, rightly lauded the losing team’s defensive effort. There were several times in the game when the Irish looked likely to score and yet somehow the French conspired to keep them out. And yet, for all the praise of the defence, here is a fact that is interesting - Ireland still scored four tries. France made a whopping 235 tackles in the game. Why they were praised was because they missed a very low per centage of those.

Imagine if France’s defence hadn’t been as good as it was. Ireland, so brilliant and organised when they attack, might have hit 50. Okay, so it was a home game, but any reliance on that caveat in the quest to rubbish the Irish right to be considered strong contenders for a tournament to be played on neutral soil overlooks the biggest rugby event of 2022. Which was Ireland’s seismic series win over New Zealand in New Zealand. The All Blacks hadn’t lost a home series since 1994. If you can beat the Kiwis on their home patch, you can win anywhere.

Ireland have now completed a sequence of 14 consecutive home wins. They’ve beaten everyone, including the world champion Boks and the All Blacks, who before they lost in New Zealand went down in November 2021 at the Aviva. The French, who arrived as Grand Slam champions, represented their last barrier to cross. And they did that so comprehensively.

TIME TO START ASKING THE QUESTION

But while no-one would dare to suggest the French were poor in Dublin, for it was a high quality and high skilled game played for the most part at a hectic pace, it is time to start asking the question: Have the World Cup hosts peaked? That would seem misplaced if you look at the fact that France themselves had gone unbeaten over a long period before the Aviva game, but it might not be if you look at the French form of the past few months.

A week before they lost to Ireland, France left it late to beat Italy. And if you go back to the autumn internationals in November 2022, it was a similar story for them against Australia, while their narrow and quite fortunate win over the Boks in Marseille was achieved against a team that was down to 14 men from a very early stage of the contest.

If France do win the World Cup on their home soil they are going to have to do it the hard way. They will have one of the world’s top four teams to contend with in their quarterfinal. They are going to have to win three big games consecutively to win the trophy. It is the same for South Africa, New Zealand and Ireland of course, but there is always extra pressure on the host to stay in the tournament, and it didn’t work out well for France when they hosted the 2007 tournament.

SO MUCH DEFENDING WILL CATCH UP AT BUSINESS END

They’ve got some monster players, and Antoine Dupont’s tackle on Mack Hansen metres from the French when a first half try looked certain was stupendous, but there was some French acknowledgement for a reality of rugby afterwards - when you have to make 235 tackles, eventually something is going to give.

You are not going to get through with such a high tackle count in three successive games in a World Cup, and maybe the Bok approach in Marseille, where they ran the French kicks back and forced Dupont’s team to tackle, has been cued by the other teams.

So while the early morning reading of the overseas media’s take on the weekend Six Nations action might cause the Bok coach/director of rugby combination some indigestion, they might well be consoled a bit by the possibility that hasn’t received so much air play over there - the World Cup hosts might well have peaked. And by September might not be the obstacle in a potential quarterfinal that we thought they might.

The next few weeks of Six Nations action, which resumes in a fortnight after this weekend’s bye, will tell us whether that is just clutching at straws…

Weekend Six Nations results

France 19 Ireland 32

Scotland 35 Wales 7

England 31 Italy 14