A disillusionment that is hard to digest. Three days after the elimination of the Blues in the quarter-finals of “their” World Cup against South Africa, the French opener Matthieu Jalibert spoke, on the airwaves of RMC, of this infuriating defeat. “Honestly it’s very, very hard. It’s really a very complicated moment for me and for the whole team. We were really dejected at the end of the match, he says. There was a lot of sadness and it’s true that in those moments I like to be alone to take a break. At the moment I don’t necessarily want to return to the field, I want to isolate myself and stay with my loved ones. Both physically and mentally.”
In the days to come and discussing the Blues’ upcoming deadlines, he emphasizes that “after a failure, there is a dynamic with anger, denial and the fact of climbing up the slope little by little.” And the UBB opener returns to the match itself: “I think that at certain moments we did too much and we overplayed. In the end we got caught in our own game a bit, that is to say that as soon as we lost a ball they played with the foot, created an imbalance and we stupidly took tries. According to the pressure and opportunism” of the Boks.
Matthieu Jalibert – who explains in the Moscato Show that he was hit in the back in a tackle by Eben Etzebeth – also returned to the refereeing of New Zealander Ben O’Keeffe. “It’s complicated because as soon as you lose, there’s this frustration and you look for someone to blame. But the problem, I think that in the first hour it was us. We had periods of domination where we were really in place, we had chances but where we were not able to score, he says. We put ourselves in a position where we let the South Africans come back and believe it. Obviously, the referee is human. I’m not going to reverse all the decisions, maybe he was wrong but he’s human and everyone makes mistakes.”
Despite everything, the Bordeaux-Bègles flyhalf underlines that the Blues were able to make the French public dream during this competition. “We may not be world champions but we left a good image and we won the hearts of the French. In Bordeaux, I have also seen the look and speech of people since my return, it also warms our hearts, he confides. Since the start of the competition, we have had a lot of love. We feel that, in defeat as in victory, people are always with us. And that’s the most important thing.”
