Antoine Dupont missing for now as Galthie names 33-man France squad

What a lovely thing to say! I’ll keep shouting!!!

May the gods of rugby hear you !

He’s involved in a club that plays much more than 30 games a season usually.

He has had multiple ACL injuries which cut down on those numbers. If you look at the seasons he is fully healthy, he plays 30 or approaches it. For example, 21/22 30 games and over 2000 minutes, leading France to their first 6N win + grand slam in a long time.

Yes, some do play 29. McKenzie played 27. The most used All Black last year was Will Jordan with 2059 minutes across 27 games. Now compare to LBB, who has played 31 matches and 2295 minutes this season. Expecting him to tour and play another 3 test matches on the other side of the world is not realistic, hopefully you can get your head around that.

Indeed they do, there are pros and cons to each system. The best thing about the Top 14 is it creates a massive interest in the sport across the country for the French people which is important. It also creates so many jobs for different nationalities to play the game, which otherwise would not be possible elsewhere.

DuPont doesn’t play 30 games a season. He has roughly 265 games at Test and Senior level in 12 seasons.

So Inc test matches, thats approx 23 games per year.

Inc Tests most ABs ( top guys) play 26-29. I seem to think Dmac was mentioned as playing 29 last year.

Yrs some guys play a lot of rugby in top 14.

The 9 players from the final will be:

-Dupont, Ntamack, Gourgues, Meafou, Mauvaka, Brennan (Stade Toulousain)

-Nouchi, Verhaeghe, Cadot (Montpellier)

For Cadot, it’s a huge surprise considering the centres! But he was phenomenal this season.

NTmack should be there .

This is shaping up as quite tasty for a first match lineup for our ABs under the roof where rugby so far has been full of running esp if both sides bring the endeavor they are capable of

There are any number of stars, even potential greats in this French team. Guillard, Depoortere, Moefana for instance. This is going to be hell of a test first up for the new coaches and a team that hasn’t had any warm up. Hoping there won’t be a deluge of hate descend on the ABs if they lose this one…

I thought this competition was supposed to remove the instances where teams go on tour with barely any household names?

Galthié also said that some of the players that exceeded the 30 games/2000 minutes were very eager to participate and had 1 or 2 high level games left in the bag (Jalibert or Penaud), while others were clearly in the red in their fitness although not exceeding the limits (Ollivon, Gros, Cros, Ramos, Marchand).

And said above, Alldritt got injured during the last La Rochelle game.

Penaud was very eager to come, probably to prove that he wants to get his spot back.