France – New Zealand. “A match for the beauty of the devil”: the opinion of Midol after the heroic victory of the French

We loved everything about this France – New Zealand. The unreal staging set up at the Stade de France, before kick-off. The Marseillaise a cappella, driven by these 80,000 fans generally indifferent to the first frosts which surrounded the Saint-Denis plain, Saturday evening. The Kapa O'Pongo isolated by a play of light, a sublime preamble to which the Tricolores only wished to oppose a blue line, academic but respectful. The smile in the stands of Léon Marchand, the great man of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. The fury and noise that only very big rugby matches have, for what they contain in anguish, suspense, spectacle and savagery , know how to trigger in our noble kingdom. This match? He thus had both the beauty of the devil and the chic of a Belle Époque evening. It was just as much shaped by the individual technique of the All Blacks and those passes with the line which so many times tore the tricolor curtain, as enhanced by the epic defensive sequences linked to the north of Paris by Antoine Dupont and his teammates.

A victory more significant than the previous ones

Because there was ultimately all the most beautiful things about rugby, in this single meeting: a war in direct conquest largely dominated by the All Blacks, races, stamps and tries which seemed to respond to each other, here flattened by Cameron Roigard, there marked by Louis Bielle-Biarrey, about whom we wonder if there is a faster player on the international circuit today.

Would we have taken such a step if the XV of France had finally left this magnificent match to the evening visitors? The question has no reason to be, like that, hotly, at a time when we are all still bewitched by the third consecutive victory of the gang in Galthié against the nation which, failing to invent it , reinvented rugby. At the moment of concluding, we say above all that the two previous times, the All Blacks had not presented in Saint-Denis neither the same firepower, nor the same individuals, the New Zealand of 2020 having by example pointed to the “SDF” with in its hold the Montpellier George Bridge or the Toulouse Nepo Laulala, whose real level of play we now know, their rare outings in the Top 14 having contributed to unmasking them. In any case, and if the French victory was certainly not as authoritarian as the previous ones, it has, in view of the superb opposition seen on Saturday evening, the value of a thousand others… Looking forward to the sequel!