Gaëlle Hermet’s teammates are preparing to relive at the Northland Events Center in Whangarei (north) a moment they have already experienced three times this year: listening to “Fratelli d’Italia” sung at the top of their lungs by highly motivated and determined Italians to give them a hard time, as they had already done during the Six Nations Tournament as well as in preparation matches at the beginning of September.
If the Tricolores had beaten the Transalpines during the Tournament (39-6) on a score which does not reflect a match during which the Bleues had been heckled and clumsy, their two following confrontations ended in an unconvincing victory in Nice (21 -0), then a bitter defeat (26-19) in Biella, just before flying to Auckland.
What to say to the coach of the French Thomas Darracq, who renewed most of his starting XV against England to start against the “Azzurre”, that this meeting is the “beautiful” of the two preparation matches.
For the second row Safi N’Diaye, who will be on the bench on Saturday, “frankly, no, it’s not revenge: we discussed it with the mental trainer, it’s in the past for us”.
“We have come a long way since Biella and, in the World Cup, the matches are completely different. If there is any revenge (to be taken), it is for us, the players, individually and collectively. Because at Biella, we did not show what we could do, what we were capable of”, assures the player with 88 selections.
– “Threatening everywhere” –
“We necessarily think about it because when we played the last time against them, we lost, but it’s not so much a revenge but (to show) that we have rebuilt ourselves since the three group matches”, abounds the second line Céline Ferer.
And then, recalls the Basque, for whom this is the last competition before retiring, “there is no room for error: either you win or you go home”.
The challenge posed, what about the game? On the French side, we want, as Ferer summarizes, “to keep this course on the defense (214 tackles against England, editor’s note) and continue to progress in the offensive sector”, that is to say to do better than when of the game against Fiji (7 tries).
Without losing sight of the fact that Italy “is a team which has the capacity to produce a lot of play, to be threatening everywhere, which has grown enormously, evolved and taken on a real dimension”, analyzes David Ortiz, the coach of the Blues in charge of the scrum.
Finally, he underlines, “it’s a team that is also very tactical in its approach, which adapts, with players capable of distributing the ball well”.
If the French manage to get out of the Italian trap, another type of challenge awaits them in the semi-finals: nothing less than the “Black Ferns”, reigning world champions, and at home, if the latter beat the Welsh.
