“I remind you that Posolo Tuilagi was only called up the day before the match against Ireland. Before, he had participated in training as an U20 or additional player, in opposition. He had not participated in the specific work on the sidelines and in the scrum for example. He had just touched the XV of France a little. He found himself thrown into the Vélodrome in the second half in a difficult context, after only two meetings at the hotel and training the day before the match. And we are very happy with his entry. Nolann Le Garrec also made a very nice entrance. Little by little, he is taking ownership of the position, the role and the international level. But who says integrating new players means removing players. That wasn’t our plan. Our desire is the group, the team, solidarity, in big moments as well as in more difficult times. We performed as a group, we lost as a group. Our idea, with the staff and the leaders, is to keep this framework while giving space to young people in coaching or injured.
“We are competitors and we prepare to win all our games. We fell. Right away, in the locker room, it was not the time for analysis but for solidarity, courage, commitment. You need it in difficult times. These are difficult moments to live through. They will be for every defeat. Because we seek victory. There were emotions, feelings shared collectively. And, in these moments, the notion of group is very, very important. This was the case the next day too. When we got back to work on Sunday, we talked about this with the staff, the leaders, then the players. We took the time to share these emotions, these completely human feelings. But the values of rugby teach us to be stronger together. Here again I am talking about solidarity, commitment and courage. It was a great happiness, a great joy to work on the analysis of the match. A lot of things didn’t work out. But the great joy was to appeal to the notion of group, to the notion of trust. The players must feel our confidence and we must feel theirs. Obviously, when you lose, we are self-critical. And we have always been very critical and very demanding of ourselves. We never shy away from it. Because we are focused on doing one thing: helping the French team win.”
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“We spend a lot of time working together on leadership. It’s our first circle, in the staff, then our leaders and then our group. Beyond a speech, it is more of a method. Embody a mission, a desire to win. This notion is even stronger, more intense, more powerful in these moments. The values of our game give us more strength. It is in difficulty that we find the resources to perform better, to be better. Our path does not resemble a long, quiet river. No player, no member of the staff has had a well-shaded path to get here. Today we are clearly facing a difficult time. And this is where we become one, where we become a group. This is where I have the pleasure I have to share with my staff and our group of leaders.”
“It’s especially the score that doesn’t satisfy us. The important thing is to win, whatever the animation put in place. A match when it is missed, when it is lost, the more you watch it, the more it is missed and the more it is lost. But it’s just one match. Take a successful and won match, the more you look at it, the more successful it is and the more it is won… The idea is to be very hard and very demanding with us on the quality of our performance but, above all, to switch to the next match that you want to be more successful. The question of possession and dispossession, I am not sure that it arises in Ireland. The question was rather our ability to exert pressure on the opponent and we had a lot of things to manage from the conquest and reconquest of the ball before embarking on a collective strategy with or without the ball.
Comments collected at a press conference
