Scotland v France: Five takeaways as Les Bleus pay the price for ‘shocking tactical arrogance’ and Scots ‘earn the right to dream’
Scotland winger Darcy Graham and an inset of Ben White and Antoine Dupont.
Following Scotland’s 50-40 victory over France at Murrayfield, here are our five takeaways from the Six Nations stunner.
The Top Line
This match at Murrayfield may very well join 1990 and 2000 in the pantheon of Scotland’s most extraordinary afternoons, 13 tries shared across eighty minutes of rugby that swung between the sublime and the chaotic, Scotland’s ferocious early ambition burning France alive before Les Bleus fashioned a late rally that gave the scoreline a respectability their performance had rarely merited.
Darcy Graham took just four minutes to set the tone, finishing with the predatory instinct that defines him at his best, and though Louis Bielle-Biarrey and Theo Attissogbe struck back with two French tries in quick succession to threaten a different kind of afternoon entirely, Scotland’s response was overwhelming and immediate, Kyle Steyn crossing twice either side of Pierre Schoeman’s loosehead demolition of the French scrum, Ben White adding a fifth from close range to give the hosts a lead that France’s character, if not their discipline, would never quite allow them to accept entirely.
Graham completed his brace on fifty-eight minutes, Steyn had already taken his in the 51st minute, Tom Jordan arriving off the bench to apply the seventh with the kind of flourish that captures a perfect Edinburgh afternoon, before Dupont, Ramos and Jégou scored the consolation tries in the final fifteen minutes that ensured the scoreline, whilst historic, would never fully reflect just how comprehensively Scotland had dismantled the champions when it mattered most.
Rampant Scotland ruin France’s Six Nations Grand Slam dream with emphatic victory at Murrayfield
A Performance for the Ages
59 per-cent possession and nine of the 10 top carriers in the game being Scots, encapsulates everything that unfolded across an extraordinary Murrayfield afternoon with a completeness that any number of column inches cannot match.
Scotland suffocated France, starved them, reduced the most technically accomplished side in the Six Nations to something resembling disorganised frustration through three qualities that romantic rugby followers associate with the prime Scottish game at its very best; precision, legality and speed.
Gregor Townsend’s most decisive tactical contribution was the one made before kick-off, refusing the power battle that France had prepared for and offering instead a pace battle that Les Bleus had no meaningful answer to, the breakdown and set-piece so precise that France’s formidable physicality up front was rendered a redundant weapon, their power carries and brute power rendered irrelevant in a game played at a tempo Les Bleus could neither dictate nor disrupt.
France cannot play without the ball, and Fabien Galthie has never pretended otherwise, building his entire system around the premise that Les Bleus will have it in the right places at the right times, their attacking architecture utterly dependent on that most fundamental of conditions, which Scotland understood, prepared for with evident precision and dismantled with a ruthlessness that produced seven tries and what can only be described as a hammering of the tournament’s outstanding side.
It left the Murrayfield faithful with a performance that belongs firmly in the conversation about Scotland’s greatest ever days in Test rugby and admiration for the turnaround Townsend has catalysed in four short weeks.
Made in Scotland
The half-back battle that consumed the week’s preview columns was settled with something approaching emphatic brilliance, with Ben White outplaying the great Antoine Dupont in every dimension that mattered through sheer speed of delivery, the ball leaving his hands so quickly that France’s formidable breakdown machinery was rendered largely irrelevant before it got off the team bus.
Dupont is the finest scrum-half on earth, but White’s tempo forced errors from players unaccustomed to making them, the French back row repeatedly arriving at rucks to find the ball already gone and their defensive line scrambling to reset. Put simply, the Scottish ruck speed killed every bit of French ambition before they could set, reset or reload.
The Toulouse man’s day was summed up by his panic under his own posts, a quite remarkable aberration by a rugby genius, but all caused through Scottish scoreboard pressure.
Russell did the rest, his distribution matching White’s urgency with something close to violent precision, Scotland keeping the ball deliberately to the right through significant passages of the second half, forcing Matthieu Jalibert and Thomas Ramos to hunt it into the low winter sun hanging over the Murrayfield west stand, blinding them at the moments that mattered most. It was tactical intelligence of the highest order; the kind Townsend rarely receives credit for deploying.
White and Russell set the terms from the first whistle, and France, for all their considerable qualities, never found the tempo required to escape the conditions Scotland had so carefully constructed around them.
French Flaws Exposed
The tighthead problem France have when Uini Atonio hasn’t been around has been more obvious than Galthie has been comfortable acknowledging, whispered about in French rugby circles through two championship campaigns with sufficient care that the wider conversation never quite crystallised around it. Scotland found it, targeted it and exploited it with a systematic persistence that left the French scrum increasingly desperate as the afternoon wore on, the set-piece platform that underpins everything Galthie builds crumbling precisely when his side needed it most.
Twelve penalties conceded, two yellow cards, and turnovers surrendered in one form or another on fifteen separate occasions across eighty minutes, numbers that tell the story of a side that had apparently spent the fallow week modelling their Instagram Le Crunch kit launch to notice how much Scotland had improved.
France paid no notice to the Scottish threat and paid the price through woeful concentration and some shocking tactical arrogance; their assumption that Scotland would simply wilt under the weight of French reputation exposed as the most expensive miscalculation of this championship.
The illegality was symptomatic of complacency and poor preparation, the consequence of a side unable to compete at the breakdown due to the Scottish clearance pace or get a foothold into the scrum through legitimate means, forced into cynicism by Scotland’s speed and into error by Scotland’s patience. The two yellow cards were the most visible expression of a discipline that collapsed entirely when the photographs stopped and the rugby started.
Want more from Planet Rugby? Add us as a preferred source on Google to your favourites list for world-class coverage you can trust.
The Last Day
France were demolished but remarkably France are still favourites for the title, although their Grand Slam dreams are in pieces. That is the extraordinary, maddening arithmetic of a final-round picture that Scotland’s performance deserved to reshape entirely, but which the points difference column has only partially rewired.
France’s six tries, after a late rally, earned them the try bonus that keeps them level on points; their vastly superior points difference accumulated across four clinical bonus-point wins provides a cushion that Scotland’s 10-point margin of victory today has narrowed without eliminating.
Scotland must therefore go to Dublin, beat Ireland with a bonus point, and rely upon England to do in Paris what Scotland did at Murrayfield today, which is to say deny France the victory that would render everything else irrelevant. Ireland, sitting third with their own title mathematics still breathing, will have no interest in facilitating Scotland’s coronation. England, unpredictable as ever, remain capable of anything in Paris on their day but will fear a France that will be furious with this performance.
Scotland have earned the right to dream. France, humiliated and strangely fortunate, retain the right to win it anyway.