Montpellier turned up at the Arms Park on Sunday to take on a Cardiff Blues side beset by injuries and low on confidence but not even a one-man advantage for the last 55 minutes tempted the beaten 2011 Top 14 finalists into shrugging themselves out of their strait-jacket.
Toulon, the current Top 14 leaders, had shown slightly more attacking intent on their October visit to the Arms Park, but so unused were they to giving the ball air that passes were dropped or thrown forward in a miasma of mistakes.
"It was a change from the Top 14 which is more about mauling and scrummaging," said the Toulon prop Gethin Jenkins, a refugee from the economic crisis engulfing regional rugby in Wales whose preference for a faster game has left him on the bench for most of the season.
When Toulon started their Top 14 campaign back in August, their starting lineup contained four players who were eligible to play for France. When they started their rise to the top five years ago, bankrolled by a multi-millionaire, they were coached by Philippe Saint-André who, after his time with Gloucester and Sale, brought with him an Anglo-Saxon attention to detail and organisation; and Jonny Wilkinson to kick the goals.
He was succeeded by Bernard Laporte who, as the coach of France between 1999 and 2007, set out to eradicate the indiscipline that had for so long been a feature of the French game. It did not win them the 2007 World Cup, failing to out-England England in the semi-final, and they were given the runaround by Argentina in the play-off.
When Alex Potter and Georges Duthen wrote The Rise of French Rugby in 1961, they celebrated the sport's French Revolution, likening it to the impact Hungary had had on football in the previous decade. "It is progressive, exciting and enthusiastic," they wrote. "The French rugby player has a quality few British or Dominion players possess – a Latin temperament that bubbles in gay adventure on the field."
The adventure at the Arms Park last Sunday was gray rather than gay, the same in Montferrand where Clermont Auvergne won a kicking contest with Leinster. The last three Top 14 finals have produced a mere two tries, both scored by Fijian wings, and have been far tighter and tenser affairs than those in the Aviva Premiership and the RaboDirect Pro 12.
Memories of big French forwards, with faces so rearranged that they looked as if they were escapees from a chain gang, running and handling like three-quarters, often holding the ball in one hand and splattering an opponent's face with the other before bringing off an audacious pass, have receded to a distant point.
French rugby, as Brian Moore once put it, was a mixture of the beautiful and the brutal. If the game arrived in the country in 1872 through a group of British students who were based in Le Havre, a game introduced to Gaul by the Romans had survived in Brittany up to 1870.
It was called soule and involved a chase for a big ball of leather that was covered with hay. "It was a hot, dramatic game," wrote Potter and Duthen, "with fighting, strangling and head-breaking; a game in which a scoundrel could slay an enemy as if by accident."
France always seemed to play it their way, inconsistent but mercurial. They did not travel as well as their wines and were unpredictable, but when they turned up they could be irrepressible: think the 1999 World Cup semi-final against New Zealand at Twickenham, when they were 24-10 down in the second-half before exploding into colour and winning by 12 points.
It was so French yet, as Potter and Duthen noted: "Individualism, well known as an asset of the French people, is generally, in the matter of manipulating the oval ball, a maker of liabilities." In professional sport, liabilities tend not to have lasting careers.
French clubs have long had an active transfer market: the first championship final was staged 120 years ago and they were long inured to a league system when the home unions dumped merit tables and the like less than a decade before amateurism went the way of the four-point drop goal.
But whereas in the 1920s and 1930s, when they were in trouble with the International Rugby Board for making illegal payments and transfer inducements, French clubs can buy who they want and the Top 14 has become a redoubt for players from all over the world, from the South Seas islands and New Zealand to Georgia and Romania.
Clermont's Heineken Cup squad this season contains players of 10 different nationalities; Montpellier is home to seven Argentina internationals, one of the reasons why the Pumas last month agreed to have no more than two players from one Top 14 club in their match-day squad on tour in Europe.
The French influence in the Top 14 has been diluted through the import of coaches as well as players; there is little to differentiate their clubs from those in other countries. The individualism cherished by followers of their rugby throughout the years has given way to the corporate culture; if that can be said of most countries – national identities are nowhere near as marked as they were even 30 years ago – the decline of the French way of playing rugby is the greatest loss.
For someone growing up in Wales in the 1970s, the most eagerly anticipated fixture was France, foxes against knuckle-dustered swashbucklers, and to see Montpellier play so turgidly, with such a lack of feeling and colour, regarding the ball as a grenade, was horribly dispiriting.
"The fête continues" the former France captain Lucien Mias, who was described as a bulldozer with a brain, used to say after a match, whether in victory or defeat. It is fate that now does the continuing.
Progress will always be slow in attempts to revamp Heineken Cup
France are not doing badly in this season's Heineken Cup with only Biarritz's cause looking forlorn at the halfway stage after they lost in Connacht. Toulon should top their group with home matches against Sale and Cardiff Blues to come and even a bonus point defeat in Leinster this weekend would leave Clermont Auvergne in a strong position.
Toulouse head their group, but have away matches against Ospreys and Leicester to come, Castres and Montpellier are currently second in their groups, chasing one of the best runners-up positions, which looks the very best Racing Métro can hope for.
Only two French clubs have ever won the Heineken Cup: Toulouse were the first, back in 1996, and have claimed the trophy three times since, making them the most successful team in the tournament's history. Brive prevailed in 1997 but, like the Aviva Premiership sides, the Top 14 teams have struggled to contain the Irish in the last seven years.
Which is one reason why the two sets of clubs have combined to try to change the way the Heineken Cup is set up, although lost in the debate has been their desire to enhance the Amlin Challenge Cup, a competition which in the group stage is all too often a meeting of professional and amateur sides and is not fit for purpose.
The talks over the Heineken Cup have not got very far, not least because the dividing line is drawn between clubs in England and France on one side and unions from the Celtic countries and Italy on the other.
The 17-year history of professional rugby has been, in Europe at least, a battle between clubs and unions, a gradual loss of empire and creation of new territories. Progress is taken in small steps and a problem the Aviva and Top 14 sides face is that what is at issue is not so much what they are proposing, but who is putting forward the suggestions.
In years to come, surely, tournaments like the Heineken Cup will be run by slimline boards under a chief executive with clout, drawn from areas of speciality rather than governing bodies, but as long as countries such as Wales insist on players wearing national jerseys with the name of the union under the motif, progress will be painfully slow.
In one sense, there is more to be gained for the English and French clubs, the bad publicity aside, from pulling out of the talks and plotting their cross-border future together than spending hours talking with the Heineken Cup stakeholders and getting no further than a Japanese scrum against Argentina.
France are not doing badly in this season's Heineken Cup with only Biarritz's cause looking forlorn at the halfway stage after they lost in Connacht. Toulon should top their group with home matches against Sale and Cardiff Blues to come and even a bonus point defeat in Leinster this weekend would leave Clermont Auvergne in a strong position.
Toulouse head their group, but have away matches against Ospreys and Leicester to come, Castres and Montpellier are currently second in their groups, chasing one of the best runners-up positions, which looks the very best Racing Métro can hope for.
Only two French clubs have ever won the Heineken Cup: Toulouse were the first, back in 1996, and have claimed the trophy three times since, making them the most successful team in the tournament's history. Brive prevailed in 1997 but, like the Aviva Premiership sides, the Top 14 teams have struggled to contain the Irish in the last seven years.
Which is one reason why the two sets of clubs have combined to try to change the way the Heineken Cup is set up, although lost in the debate has been their desire to enhance the Amlin Challenge Cup, a competition which in the group stage is all too often a meeting of professional and amateur sides and is not fit for purpose.
The talks over the Heineken Cup have not got very far, not least because the dividing line is drawn between clubs in England and France on one side and unions from the Celtic countries and Italy on the other.
The 17-year history of professional rugby has been, in Europe at least, a battle between clubs and unions, a gradual loss of empire and creation of new territories. Progress is taken in small steps and a problem the Aviva and Top 14 sides face is that what is at issue is not so much what they are proposing, but who is putting forward the suggestions.
In years to come, surely, tournaments like the Heineken Cup will be run by slimline boards under a chief executive with clout, drawn from areas of speciality rather than governing bodies, but as long as countries such as Wales insist on players wearing national jerseys with the name of the union under the motif, progress will be painfully slow.
In one sense, there is more to be gained for the English and French clubs, the bad publicity aside, from pulling out of the talks and plotting their cross-border future together than spending hours talking with the Heineken Cup stakeholders and getting no further than a Japanese scrum against Argentina.
guardian
