Many believe that the television match official should have intervened for Kolbe’s conversion, that he had started his charge early, but Dupont’s ire did not end there. O’Keeffe judged that an early deliberate knock-on from Eben Etzebeth, which would have been a yellow card and penalty try to France, had in fact travelled backwards. By the end of the match, in France’s last stand as they pushed for victory and trailed by one point, Dupont had become so exasperated with the referee’s ruck interpretations that he had given up complaining, instead resigning himself to hopelessly flinging his arms in the air at the back of every breakdown as if to say: “Are you going to do anything about this?”.
But there were other legal acts of notoriety at play. South Africa unloaded a tactical masterclass, calling a scrum from a mark for the first time, a now illegal act which became a hallmark of their World Cup campaign alongside the seven-one bench split. Their high-ball barrage, targeting the French wings, worked to dramatic effect, too. The standard of the match was celestial. Indeed, one senior English coach has described France’s opening 10-minute spell to Telegraph Sport as about as close to rugby nirvana as they have seen.
The party line from within the French camp has been that 2023 means nothing – on both sides, new players, new coaches, new tactics – but the ghosts of that defeat still haunt them. Bad blood? Not quite, but Saturday’s Test means more than most.
“It will stay with me for life,” William Servat, France’s assistant coach and former hooking great, told Figaro last month. “It is etched, burnt into me. It was the end of our tournament. But the French champion last year restarted this season as the champion of nothing. Right now, we are preparing for Saturday’s match with different coaches to 2023, different players. It’s a completely different competition, a completely different challenge. An even bigger challenge given that we were eliminated by this team in the quarter-finals, but that injects enthusiasm into the group to go out and play.
“But, this match is not the end of a tournament; it has nothing to do with what happened in 2023. Going back over the past slows you down. We have evolved.”
Laurent Labit, attack coach on that day in 2023 and now the director of rugby at Perpignan, recently told Midi Olympique that it was the toughest defeat he had ever experienced as a coach. It did not sound as though Labit was over it, even now.
