France v England 30/8/03 Match Review

By Kath 31/8/03
August 31 2003

France took on England in the cauldron that was Marseille and beat them! Frankly 'Les Bleus' deserved their win - this was a very indiciplined performance from England.

France took on England in the cauldron that was Marseille and beat them!  

Both teams swapped penalties early on and then Paul Grayson sent Mike Tindall through for the first try. Frédéric Michalak France's answer to Jonny Wilkinson then missed two penalties but pulled off a stunning drop goal.   Then Nicolas Brusque went over for France's try.  We then had the most unfortunate incident that I have witnessed ever from an England set up, when one of the England touchline team ran in front of Frédéric Michalak just as he was taking the conversion which he subsequently missed. 

"We can only apologise to the French. It wasn't meant, and I apologise profusely,"  said Clive Woodward afterwards.

Again Penalties were swapped and the half time score was France 14 - England 13.   Lots of stupid mistakes greeted us in the second half and two more penalties ensued one for each team.  Final Score: France 17 - England 16.

The 'Les Bleus' deserved their win, this was a indiscipline match throughout from England.  Clive Woodward England Head Coach is quoted as being disappointed at the loss of the match and the unbeaten run of games as he truly believed England would win that match.  

Clive said "This was a game we wanted to win - we weren't messing around - but we have now got to be realistic about why we lost," Woodward added. "It was a bit of a scrappy game from our point of view, but there is no doubt in my mind that we will go to the World Cup better prepared than we were four years ago."

So what did we learn from that match?  Discipline has to be looked at with some of these so called fringe players, the midfield defence worked well.   

That Paul Grayson will no doubt have booked his place on the plane to the Rugby World Cup as he kicked 11 of England's points and overall had an impressive game.  Grayson also set up a break for Mike Tindall's first-half try with a delayed short pass in midfield

We lost the unbeaten run - now to statisticians this will be a devastation, to my mind its one less burden for the team to carry around.  Its gone, lets forget it and move on, the bigger prize is to be found in the Southern Hemisphere and now England can go to the World Cup without Media Reporters prattling on about unbeaten runs - we may find we get better questions asked now of England. 

Oh and another thing, the new 'Kit', seemed to fall apart a bit like England's performance in Marseilles!  Not impressed with this new kit. Perhaps this was one of the contributing factors for the scrum constantly collapsing, nothing to get a grip on?