JAMES HARRINGTON
FRENCH COLUMN
FRANCE international Anthony Jelonch has had surgery to repair the ACL rupture he suffered midway through the first half of Les Bleus’ Six Nations win over Scotland at Stade de France at the end of February.
The operation, according to reports in France, was a success. That’s the good news.
The bad news, for France at least, is that his injury could not have come at a worse time in rugby terms. The abrasive, hard-tackling, big-engined flanker – aleader on and off the pitch – is out of action for six months. Even the most optimistic post-surgery diagnosis leaves no doubt that Jelonch faces a race against time to be available for the World Cup, which kicks off in Saint-Denis on September 8. The inconvenient odds are he won’t make it.
The first match– a blockbuster between France and New Zealand at Stade de France – is 180 days from today. That’s far away enough, in the minds of most of us, for World Cup talk to be merely hypotheses and conjecture; or complaining about a draw that’s long done, rather than marvelling at the prospect of the matches it has given us.
It’s near enough, however, for coaches to worry about injuries and form, even if – publicly at least – they maintain the most inscrutable of poker faces and insist their focus is only on the next match.
France will miss Jelonch for what’s left of this year’s Six Nations, and Toulouse will miss him for the remainder of the season. He’s been part of Les Bleus’ landscape for some time, and captained his country on their tour of Australia in July 2021, a couple of months before making his first appearance for the rouge-et-noir in the Top 14.
As well as six outings in France colours – all starts – since the season kicked off, he’s played 14 times for Toulouse, starting 12 matches.
In total, he played more than 1,300 minutes of rugby – nearly 1,000 of them for his club.
Jelonch’s father had plenty to say about his son’s injury, questioning why he was even on the pitch after going off for an HIA following the tackle that got Scotland’s Grant Gilchrist sent off, and later banned for the rest of the Six Nations. “Why was Anthony brought back on after a concussion protocol, when we had two substitutes with François Cros and Sekou Macalou?” he demanded in an interview with Le Parisien. “I was in the stands and I was crazy. By letting him rest, we could have avoided what happened next.”
There’s no small amount of hindsight bias in Jelonch snr’s comments, but it raises a point that is bubbling around French rugby right now, as fans and pundits look ahead to six weeks of international rugby, with a mix of confidence, and nerves. How much longer is it before France’s internationals reach their physical limits?
Jelonch’s injury – as serious as it is – is just the latest to hit the national side this season. For yesterday’s match against England, alone, France lost Matthieu Jalibert to an ankle injury in training. Lyon’s Dylan Cretin was called up to the wider 42-player squad as cover for Jelonch, but withdrew with injury; so Toulouse’s Alexandre Roumat – son of former France international Olivier – was selected as a replacement for Cretin, but withdrew with injury.
Stade Francais’ Julian Delbouis was another who pulled out of the extended squad, replaced by Montpellier’s Thomas Darmon.
“How much longer is it before France’s top international players reach their physical limits?”
At the start of this year’s Six Nations, France were without hookers Peato Mauvaka and Pierre Bourgarit, prop Jean-Baptiste Gros, locks Cameron Woki and Florian Verhaeghe, back row Yoan Tanga, scrum-half Maxime Lucu, centre Jonathan Danty, and winger Gabin Villiere.
A number of players have returned – Mauvaka, Lucu and Danty were in the Twickenham squad.
Others have yet to return. Villiere, for one, has managed just two outings for Toulon, in November and January. Latest indications are that he hopes to return from ankle trouble sometime in April.
There’s concern again, too, that a number of French players are again playing too much. Antoine Dupont broke the 1,300 minutes barrier at the end of February. An early season injury meant Romain Ntamack did not play a match between the second round of the Top 14 season and the first of the November internationals – and yet he has more than 1,100 minutes of gametime under his belt this season.
Gregory Alldritt has played longer still – reaching 1,366 minutes in the match against Scotland. But for Mohamed Haouas’s red card, and the need to replace a front row, his gametime would likely have crashed through 1,400 minutes.
Playing-time is, this year especially, a long-running conversation in France. Before the loss to Ireland in Dublin in round two of the Six Nations, Antoine Dupont was asked if French stars were burnt out. He responded, a little gnomically: “It’s not that we play too much, it’s that there are too many games.
“When you’re part of the staff of the XV of France or a Top 14 club, you always want to put your best players on the field, and that’s normal. The problem today is that the calendar is too full, and rest periods are sorely lacking … We players are in the middle and cannot ask our coaches not to play us.”
Fabien Galthie, too, conceded the pressures on his internationals were huge – but pointed out the national side’s coaching staff aren’t the ones to make the organisational changes needed to shorten the season.
Instead, he pointed out that, since he took charge, France’s July touring squads have not been made up of core players – cutting their international workload by three games a year.
“The figures say this,” he went on in an interview with Midi Olympique. “A player between 19 and 24 years old, if he wants to play well at international level, should not play more than 30 games per season; a player between 24 and 29 should not exceed 25 games; and a player between 29 and 34 wishing to remain at the highest level should not go beyond 20 games per season.
“If we pick a French team with an average age of 24 years, it is because these players are still able to support this rhythm.”
And – unlike many of his predecessors – he praised the efforts of club coaches to look after their stars. “The managers do their best: Ugo Mola gives Toulouse internationals a lot of holidays; at Racing, Cameron Woki was on leave the week he was injured … I understand the constraints of the clubs and it will never be a point of contention between us again. It has been too long.”
So, should we be worried about the ability of this undoubtedly talented French team to compete at a World Cup held on home soil? Probably, but the international staff and their clubs are doing what they can in the constraints in which they operate. And they’ve got a whole summer together to get everything in order.
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