Scotland v France: Winners and losers as ‘Mr. Teflon’ produces ‘masterclass’ on afternoon where rival’s ‘terrible gambit backfired’
Darcy Graham celebrates after Scotland's emphatic win over France and Antoine Dupont, inset
Following Scotland’s spectacular 50-40 victory over France at Murrayfield on Saturday, here’s our key winners and losers from the Six Nations clash.
Winners
Gregor Townsend
No one gave the Scottish boss a cat’s chance in hell of being in this lofty position of chasing the title with one match remaining after he was damagingly left marooned in a Round One puddle in Rome. That loss to Italy reignited calls for his removal as head coach and for the termination of the contract extension signed with the SRU last September, which would have taken him through to Rugby World Cup 2027. His consultancy with Newcastle was further muddying the waters.
However, he has shown in the weeks since then exactly what he is Scottish rugby’s Mr. Teflon. His team pulled off their near-annual spanking of England, rode out a Welsh storm in Cardiff to show they had learned from the dunking in Rome, and now this, an exhilarating record-breaking smashing of French Grand Slam hopes to give the Scots the chance of winning a first Triple Crown and Six Nations championship title in this millennium. It’s a remarkable upturn in fortunes and while Ireland are very much their bogey team, they won’t in the slightest fear coming to Dublin on the back of this Townsend-concocted masterpiece.
Murrayfield’s pre-match atmosphere
If you could bottle it and share it around the rugby world, the sport would be in a very healthy place in terms of the razzmatazz it can generate. There is always something special about the way the Scots initially get off their bus and rouse the fans before entering the bowels of the stadium. That definitely sets a tone.
Then there is the hair-raising in-stadium pageantry. The lone piper on the roof has always been a genius idea, and there is also the give-you-the-feels moment when the music stops to allow fans to sing the closing part of Flower of Scotland unaccompanied. It was yet again a stirring piece of tribalism, setting the scene for the Scots emphatically putting a stop to the French gallop to a second successive Six Nations title. They took confidence from the noise and thrived.
Darcy Graham
It was daft to see the winger held back in reserve for all three of Scotland’s February matches. The little warrior has always been a handful for defences, but Graham seems to be another player that head coach Townsend appears to have another up-and-down relationship. It was in Cardiff in Round Three where he was sent on as a replacement and produced a moment of magic, catching Finn Russell quickly kicked restart to hit the still celebrating Wales with a sucker punch.
That pulled him level on the all-time Scottish try scoring list on 35 with Duhan van der Merwe. Restored to the starting line-up against France, Darcy needed just five minutes to make the landmark his own and then another 54 minutes to move the record to 37 tries. His finishing prowess was a lovely reminder that rugby remains a game for all shapes and sizes. Go on, little man!
Training ground set-play
France appeared to have made a decisive move when going 14-7 ahead midway through the first half, but Scotland weren’t long in reducing the margin to two points with the sweetest execution of a canny lineout move in the opposition 22. Normally, a team in this position will try to maul their way forward to the line. Not Scotland. Rather than pushing after the thrown ball had been fetched in the air, it was popped by Matt Fagerson at the back of the maul to hooker George Turner.
Arching infield, the angle of his run proved a distraction as he then threw a pass in the other direction to the cantering Kyle Steyn, who blitzed the dumbfounded defence to score. It was an attack engineered in the analysis room, perfected on the training ground and executed in a match when needed. It was a perfect example that practice makes perfect when it comes to first-phase strike play.
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Jack Dempsey
Having already singled out Scottish winger Graham for his influence, we could add an endless list of his teammates in this Winners list, but we’ll settle for Townsend’s No.8 for his Lazarus-like return to action. He was said to have sustained a campaign-ending bicep injury in the February 14 win over England, but he shrugged off that medical assessment by being declared fit to start against the French.
In finishing as his team’s leading ball-carrier, he demonstrated his clear value to Scotland and the 52 metres he clocked up were central in roughing up the French, particularly during that period in the opening half when they looked like they were in the mood. The impact of Dempsey ensured that feeling was only fleeting, and he finished a deserved winner against a much-vaunted French pack who were unable to cope with his abrasiveness.
Thomas Ramos
It would be wrong to totally write off the French as being all-round terrible in Edinburgh. In the top tackling Oscar Jegou and second-best Jean-Baptiste Gros and the top line-breaking Louis Bielle-Biarrey, they had performers who merited praise. Bielle-Biarrey, for instance, scored his fifth try of this championship, following on from the record-setting eight scored last year, and he also produced three try assists, starting with a lovely kick for Theo Attissogbe and then two examples of lovely handling during a frantic finish.
Ramos, though, gets our best mention. When you see someone like Antoine Dupont getting picked off for a try intercept and then throwing a forward pass behind the French line, you know panic has crept in. However, the full-back was a calming influence. His team was on the cusp of implosion, but he demonstrated in his actions that they still very much had something to play for, and it was apt that he was the scorer of their bonus point fourth try, which restored them to the top of the table heading into the final round. That was leadership in a chaotic situation that needs to be appreciated.
Six Nations
The tournament is the gift that just keeps on giving this year. We had a top Test match on Friday night, Wales defying the glum pre-match predictions that they were an easy beat and instead causing Ireland multiple headaches before the 27-17 result was secured. That was entertaining, but what unfolded in Edinburgh upped the ante a few notches more. No one would have predicted that the Scots would put 50 on the Grand Slam-chasing French, but that 2026 edition of the championship has been brilliantly entertaining with the only guarantee being to expect the unexpected.
We now have a ‘Super Saturday’ to savour next weekend to determine the title winners. With France hosting England, they are still the favourites to succeed as they are still on top of the table heading into Round Five with 16 points and a +79 points difference compared to Scotland on 16 points (+21) and Ireland on 14 points (+16). With the Ireland-Scotland match first up, one of them will be leading the table by the time the French get to play. What fun!
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Losers
Antoine Dupont
We were initially tempted to put the French maestro into the Winners category based on the tremendous first-half rip that ignited the move that produced the Bielle-Biarrey. The scrum-half had no right to brilliantly rip the ball from the carrying Sione Tuipulotu, but rip it he did and the brisk manner in which he popped the ball to Oscar Jegou to get the scoring move going was delicious. However, what unfolded in the second half resulted in the No.9 dropping into the losers’ section.
He is an operator who rarely, if ever, throws an intercepted pass, but his error in 51 minutes resulted in a Steyn try and the sight of him then throwing a forward pass 11 minutes later behind his team’s own goal line highlighted the level of the crisis that had materialised. Admittedly, he did score before his 70th-minute exit, but if you thought he looked miserable on his last trip to Scotland, when Toulouse were beaten by Glasgow in December, he was even more dejected here having failed to keep his team on message with the game going away from them early in the second half.
Fabien Galthié
What the hell was the French coach thinking when he complained on Thursday about the size of the away team dressing room at Murrayfield? Branding it “the smallest in the world” was always going to be interpreted as disrespectful, and it was a self-inflicted faux pas on his part. Having seen his title-defending team enjoy a winning February, the coach should have felt bulletproof heading to Scotland rather than whinging about the facilities given to his team.
Galthié’s allegation that they had to change in the corridor and that it set a tone whenever Murrayfield was lapped up by Townsend, who laughed off his rival’s claim but intriguingly added: “If it sets the tone, it’s interesting.” You can be sure it was something talked about by the Scots internally, giving them another reason to sock it to the French and make them feel uncomfortable in surroundings they had erroneously admitted to being uncomfortable in. Speaking out was a terrible gambit by the coach that brutally backfired and he is now back in the firing line about a damaging second-half collapse.
The gone squad
The French pack arrived with the reputation of a bully unit, but they left with their credentials severely bruised. There was a damning interval statistic that highlighted how their team made just 28 post-contact metres in the first half compared to Scotland’s 70, and this malaise continued into the second half, with this difference between the teams especially visible in the try finished by Ben White.
Several Scottish forwards just powered through the contact as if the opposition didn’t exist. That concession was the prompt for Galthié to cut his starting XV losses, whipping off Julien Marchand, Mickael Guillard and Charles Ollivon along with Nicolas Depoortère in one go. Marchand and Guillard have both been culpable for creating the space for White to dart through. Rather than rely on these established brute-force players in the unfolding crisis, they were all deemed unworthy of remaining in the fray, something that was a bad look for a team with such a lofty reputation.
Les Bleus’ indiscipline
The penalty count only read 10-8 against the French, which suggests there wasn’t much in the naughty step antics between the two teams. But that final tally was a misleading reflection of what unfolded. By the time that France lost the plot and had copped two yellow cards and an allegation of eye gouging, the penalty count was 10-4 against them.
It was the devil in the detail that highlighted precisely why they ultimately fell an embarrassing 47-14 behind. Garbage time did offer them the solace of Scotland infringing and suffering a yellow card, but their consolation tries couldn’t disguise how terrible their behaviour got.
Matthieu Jalibert
The French out-half was the recipient of much love for the stylish way he ran his team in their opening wins over Ireland and Wales. However, having sat out the victory over Italy due to a calf issue even though he had originally been due to start, he didn’t look himself on his return to the team in Scotland and his day of woe was summed up by his first-half yellow card.
Not to downplay the calibre of his earlier performances, but it is easy to look the polished part behind a team providing ample go-forward ball, but Saturday was an afternoon to help his side in a very different situation and he was unable to deliver. There was still the off flash of tremendous skill, but the game management that France needed for him didn’t materialise. It will now lead to a reappraisal of all the praise heaped on him last month on his successful return to Test rugby.
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