Late night on Sunday 16 November 2003, Fabien Galthié was reckoning with the idea that he may just have played the last match of his career. After 17 years, it wasn’t how he wanted it to finish. Galthié had spent the last four of those 17 as captain, working with the coach Bernard Laporte to rebuild the France team. They had made them disciplined and consistent. The approach had won a grand slam in 2002, but now, in the moment they needed it most, it had failed them. In the World Cup semi-final against England, they had two men sent to the sin-bin and lost 24-7.
“If we had won,” Laporte said, “this man would have been hailed as the best scrum-half in the history of French rugby.” As for Galthié, “I want to publicly thank Bernard for placing his faith in me,” he said, “and for allowing me one final adventure with this team. I wanted to do more, I dreamed of a different ending.”
He’s still dreaming about it now. Two decades later, Laporte and Galthié are back, only these days Laporte is head of the French federation and Galthié is his new head coach. The goal now is the same as it was then, to win a first World Cup for France, in 2023 on home soil. Another of their gang, Raphaël Ibañez, is there too as manager. In 2002 Ibañez and Galthié shared the captaincy between them. “It was an honour for me to captain France but I’m happy to hand the armband back to him,” Ibañez said back then. “He shows us the way. All we have to do is follow.”
As it was then, so it is again. They have pulled together a strong group of assistant coaches – Shaun Edwards, William Servat, Laurent Labit – and called up 19 uncapped players in their squad of 42. Two of them are in the starting XV to play England on Sunday, two more on the bench. Their squad has an average age of 24, and 10 caps apiece. Their captain, Charles Ollivon, is a 26-year-old who has started seven Tests in six years. France are starting all over again, all over again, just like they did under Galthié’s predecessors, Philippe Saint-André in 2012, Guy Novès in 2016, and Jacques Brunel in 2018.
They were good coaches too, strong characters with their own ideas about what the team needed. In the end, they managed one top-three finish in the Six Nations, (third, in 2017) and won 37 out of 89 Tests between them, Saint-André had 20 out of 45, Noves seven out of 21, Brunel 10 out of 23. The question, then, is why Galthié thinks his France are going to be any different. It’s true they are an unusually good group of young players, who won back-to-back Under-20 World Championships in 2018 and 2019. But then, when have the French ever lacked raw talent? Galthié’s generation had that too, but it wasn’t what made them successful.
You can learn a lot about what Galthié wants from his team by looking at the man he picked to lead them. It was Saint-André who gave Ollivon his debut, back in the autumn of 2012. He was only 21, but brilliantly gifted. Since then, he’s suffered a series of shoulder injuries, the last of them so severe that he almost quit the game, until he finally found a surgeon who could fix it for him. “The reasons are pretty simple,” says Galthié. “His journey wasn’t easy, he was a brilliant player, but the physical problems he’s had, the experiences he’s had, these are the moments that make you doubt yourself. But he managed to come back strong.”
Ollivon was a reserve for the World Cup, when Galthié was working as Brunel’s assistant coach. But he played his way into the starting XV over the course of the tournament, and in the quarter-final against Wales was one of the best players on the field.
Galthié was a reserve for the 1995 and 1999 World Cups, too, and did exactly the same thing. In 1999, in what might still be the greatest game of rugby ever played, France’s comeback victory against the All Blacks in the semi-final, it was Galthié who gave the speech his teammates remembered afterwards. “We can win,” he told them, “we are in England but we are at home because we are in Europe, the whole of Twickenham will be with us, we can win.” And they believed him.
Galthié’s teammate Thomas Castaignède once tried to explain why he was such a good captain. “You have to understand,” Castaignède said, “Galthié’s great strength is that he’s been shunted from pillar to post, treated like dirt one minute, lauded to the skies the next, and he’s had the strength to come back every time.”
In his first big interview after he became head coach, with Midi Olympique, Galthié said there were three things he wanted to address, one was the pack, one was the defence, and most importantly the identity of the team. “How will they behave in the good times? How will the team behave in the bad times?” Galthié said. “These are questions of character, and it is the players who will provide the answers. The character of this team, its identity, still has to be built. But we are sure of one thing, we want it to be a team that never gives up.”
Galthié’s France were tough, consistent, and disciplined. Everyone else saw that famous 1999 victory against the All Blacks as a display of outrageous talent, Galthié saw it as a triumph of character. “Flair is for the poets. I like poetry, but we play rugby,” Galthié said soon after. And in rugby “there are things you can’t do without, determination, motivation, ferocity”. Those are the qualities he’s looking for now. If he can find them, and encourage them, among this bright new generation of French players, then that dream of his may have a different ending this time around.