Fabien Galthié was in no mood afterwards. The France coach pointedly didn’t take any questions in English but you didn’t need Duolingo to understand that he had a bone to pick. Losing Antoine Dupont to a serious knee injury midway through the first half coloured his reaction to everything. His captain was in tears in the dressingroom, Pierre-Louis Barassi didn’t make it through a HIA. Galthié was annoyed on both counts.
“Our players did not return to the pitch,” he said. “We would like to understand why. On this issue, we are angry. We want to protect our players. There are means, [there are] rules. The [citing] commissioner must study the actions that are reprehensible or not. Neither Antoine nor Pierre-Louis returned to the pitch. One for a cleaning, the other for a contact.
“For Antoine, there is suspicion of a fairly serious knee injury. I won’t go into details due to medical confidentiality, but Antoine is suffering. We have cited players to appear before the [Six Nations disciplinary] committee – Tadhg Beirne and Andrew Porter. Calvin Nash has also been summoned before the committee, for Pierre-Louis Barassi because he did not respond favourably to the protocol.
“We feel bad for [Antoine]. In terms of the action, in my opinion it was reprehensible, and there are ways to study and analyse it. We feel for him today. He is suffering and we are suffering with him.”
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When Dupont went off, Grégory Alldritt took over as captain. He wasn’t as visibly disgruntled as his coach afterwards but he didn’t put a tooth in it either. Losing Dupont was a lot to take.
“At half-time, it’s hard to see a friend like that. It’s still complicated to talk about it … We felt anger, which served as fuel for the second half.”
Do they have cause? It’s incredibly hard to say either way. The incident itself isn’t clearcut and the intent or otherwise is probably in the eye of the beholder. The French were understandably aggrieved to see their star man and spiritual leader go off and to find him in crying in the dressingroom. But inferring deliberate foul play from Beirne and Porter? That seems a stretch.
“I think it’s just a rugby incident where Tadhg cleans out someone in front of Antoine Dupont and he gets hit on the back of that,” said Ireland head coach Simon Easterby. “You know, this happens unfortunately. We have definitely moved away and players have a real awareness now of cleaning out on the lower limb of a player, which can create the type of injury that might have happened today. But that wasn’t the case.
“He was securing his own ball and not making contact on Dupont and unfortunately that happens. The guy that Tadhg hit was hit on to Dupont and it’s just one of those things unfortunately. It happens in a game. I’ll probably have to look back on it again but we feel like the right decision was made there.”
In the end, they didn’t need either Dupont or Barassi to see it out. France saw Ireland’s good start to the second half and raised it a level. Their 7/1 split was a risk and it looked dicey at times, particularly with the injuries. But the bench did its job, as Alldritt acknowledged.
“We knew it was going to be a tough second half but we had a lot of confidence in the bench. They had a big, big entry against Italy and they did another good job today. The contract was to play for 50 minutes and to leave everything on the pitch and then they would come on and finish the job. And I think it worked quite well today.”
