Les Bleues will play in England “a historic match”

2023-04-28 22:59:53

Published on : 28/04/2023 – 22:59

The approximately 53,000 spectators expected on Saturday at Twickenham, a world record for a women’s rugby match, will attend an England-France match that will decide victory in the 2023 Six Nations Tournament. If the English, on a series of 4 Grand Slam in this competition, are the favorites of this duel, they will have to fight against an increasingly threatening French team.

On a series of eleven defeats against the English, their best enemies, the XV of France women will have, Saturday April 29 in London, a difficult challenge to take up, in a match which will decide the winner of the 2023 edition of the Six Tournament Nation.

Last year in Bayonne, the Red Roses won their 52^e Crunch against the French (24-12) to win a 13^e title in the Tournament since the competition changed to six teams, and their 11^e Grand Slam.

The last Grand Slam des Bleues dates back to 2018. The opening back or half Jessy Trémoulière, who will retire from international football on Saturday after 78 caps for the France team, then scored the winning try (18- 17) at 79^e minute, against England, at the Stade des Alpes in Grenoble.

“I know it will be tough on Saturday,” says Jessy Trémoulière, for whom the key to the match will be defense. “All the matches (against the English) where the score was tight, it was because from the first to the 80^e minute, we were in ‘steamroller’ mode, we suffocated them, we put grains of sand in their system of play”, based essentially on the balloons carried.

For David Ortiz, who arrived with Gaëlle Mignot at the head of the women’s XV of France before the Tournament, “it will be a historic match, a magical environment”. “But for us, he adds, it is above all a new chapter in our history”. Not to mention that this meeting will be “a rehearsal” before the next World Cup, in England in 2025, notes Mignot.

More and more competitive Blues

During the World Cup disputed in the fall of 2022 in New Zealand, the English had won against France a 53^e Crunch on the score of 13 to 7. They then experienced a huge disappointment in the final of this competition, against New Zealand at Eden Park in Auckland. The Black Ferns had not only “delighted” them with a title that had been promised to them since that of 2014, by winning 34 to 31, but had also stopped their record series of thirty victories in a row.

The English want to erase this bad memory with a new title, in front of their public, against a French team which continues to get closer to them. Lénaïg Corson is well placed to judge this gap since this young retiree from the XV of France left to play in the English championship this season. And she thinks that the Blues are in a much more buoyant dynamic.

“In England, we put on blinkers. We put the players in boxes, making the game system very readable, very based on contact and with little ability to adapt. (…) Our young French women know how to play like this and that’s what will make the difference,” said Lénaïg Corson, who left Les Bleues in August 2022 after spending 10 years in the France team and winning 30 caps.

For the former international second line, “the English system today is in crisis: we see it little in the girls, because they are on an almost invincible generation, but that does not offer anything crazy, it is very plan-plan. For the moment, it works but I think that we have nothing to envy to the English”. It’s up to the French women to prove it on Saturday in the Twickenham stadium, considered the Temple of rugby.

Composition of the XV of France women against England:

Boulard – Banet, M. Ménager, Vernier, Llorens – (o) Trémoulière, (m) Bourdon – Hermet, Escudero, Berthoumieu – Forlani (cap.), Feleu – Bernadou, Sochat, Brosseau

Substitutes: Riffonneau, Mwayembe, Khalfaoui, Ménager, Gros, Chambon, Arbez, Filopon

With AFP