LONG READ Bench injured Dupont in November? How can France solve their play-making paradox?

It’s a neat trick from the therapist’s couch: when you catch yourself judging someone else, try seeing ways in which you are alike.  Do it honestly, and you may even find the common ground of a shared personality feature, a vraisemblance. And hey presto! The judgement vanishes.

‘Both-and’ thinking is far more nutritious chicken soup for the soul than ‘either-or’. It is the same in French rugby at the moment. After their 28-20 victory over Montpellier Hérault at the weekend, Stade Toulousain unquestionably established itself as the best club side in France. Les Rouges-et-Noirs have won the past four Boucliers de Brennus and six of the past seven dating back to pre-Covid days. No argument there.

At the same time, Union Bordeaux-Bègles have won the past two Investec Champions Cups, beating all comers along the way. As their attack coach from County Clare in Ireland, Noel NcNamara explained after the thumping 41-19 win over four-star Leinster in the final last month: “The players have been really motivated by [the need to back up their first win in 2025]. There is a feeling within the group that nobody can argue with the title if you go and beat the champions of the URC [Leinster], [the reigning] champions of the Premiership [Northampton in 2025, Bath in 2026], the champions of France three times in a row [Toulouse, twice] and Leicester Tigers who are flying high in the Prem. That was a big motivating factor.”

Stade Toulousain may be the best team in France, but UBB are the top dogs in Europe. If that seems like a distinctively French paradox and you feel yourself tilting towards the black-and-white, ready to argue the toss for one or the other, take a lie down on the couch again and remember your ‘both-and’. Both can be true. Both are true at one and the same time.

That paradox is at the heart of French improvement under head coach Fabien Galthié. To have one super-club forming the basis of national selection is a pre-requisite, to have two is a generational luxury. It is a special window of opportunity not to be wasted. McNamara did his level best to compare and contrast the merits of Top 14 and EPCR fairly after the victory at the San Mames stadium in Bilbao, but he found himself magnetically pulled towards the attraction of winning the Champions Cup in the invisible space between the beginning and the end of his reply.

“They are both fantastic competitions. The history of the Top 14 is magnificent, there’s no doubt about that, but there’s an international feel in the club.

“Jonny Gray [with Exeter], Arthur Retiere [Stade Rochelais, Toulouse and UBB] and Joey Carbery [Leinster] have all won this competition, and Yannick Bru has [won it] as a player and a coach.

“Winning that first [Bouclier] would be special and hopefully the start of something, but it’s not a final destination.”

Wind the clock back to 28^th June 2024, and it was all so very different. The ex-Leinster academy guru was still reeling from a crushing 59-3 loss to their great rivals, knowing his club were not fully equipped for Top 14 trench warfare. It was a bitter pill to swallow. Some of the Bordelais players were still casting around for tickets for family and friends a couple of days before the final. Serial winners Toulouse had booked their hotel on the outskirts of Marseilles four months previously. The difference in the level of expectation was palpable.

Although UBB had moved to within gripping distance of le bout de bois one year later, losing 39-33 to Toulouse in an extra-time nailbiter, it was still a case of ‘close, but no cigar’. Les Girondins are the premier team in Europe within an international refereeing culture, but they not the best club in France, under Top 14 rules. Both facts are indisputable.

How Galthié can best incorporate that puzzle in the national team remains a bone of contention, one which tends to invite ‘either-or’ thinking. Nowhere is that truer than in the half-backs. Do you pick Antoine Dupont and Romain Ntamack from the red and black, or Maxime Lucu and Matthieu Jalibert in the claret and white? Is there a ‘both-and’ which includes the best of both worlds?

An executive board of Top 14 managers were recently asked to vote for their preference at number 10: six plumped for Ntamack, four threw in their lot with Jalibert, while the other two abstained. It could not have been tighter.

When the two premium creative talents, Dupont and Jalibert, were first yoked together, allegedly they didn’t get on too well. When Dupont left the field with a serious injury in only the 28^th minute of the 2025 Six Nations decider against Ireland in Dublin a few months later, Jalibert’s club colleague Lucu replaced him and the pair sparked a 37-point rampage which marked the apogee of France’s season. With Lucu and Ntamack coupled for the final round against Scotland in Paris, the flame was doused and Les Bleus struggled over the finish line.

While Dupont and Jalibert gelled far better at the 2026 Six Nations, the questions surrounding the best combination for the upcoming World Cup in Australia are still alive and well among aficionados of the French game.

Injury has ruled Dupont out of the July Nations Championship fixtures, but when he is fit again, there will be a real temptation to go with the red-and-black club partnership. If that happens, the balance of the French game will tilt heavily towards the number nine. Ntamack may be content to play second fiddle to Dupont in Toulouse, but in national colours, Jalibert never will.

Jalibert averages a massive 22 involvements per game more than Ntamack, although his club figures dipped slightly but significantly at this year’s Six Nations when he was paired with Dupont.

The biggest change was in the kicking game. Where Jalibert is the main kicker for his club, kicking 51 more times than Lucu despite the nine’s prowess in that area of the game, at national level Dupont takes over, kicking the ball on 68 occasions compared to Jalibert’s 27. Where Dupont averaged 14 runs per game in the Top 14, Lucu averaged a mere five. The ‘both-and’ envelope is being stretched to the limit by such stark statistical contrasts.

Of the two number 10s, Jalibert is by far the better of the two at organising an attack with his outside backs. As McNamara observes: “I haven’t seen anybody with the capability of taking the options as well as he does. So, every time Matthieu gets the ball we try to have options around him, on his inside, on his outside, options behind and there’s always the option of going over the top of the defence as well.

“He’s just incredibly good at choosing the right option and he has the speed and the skill set to take advantage of it. So, when you put it all together, he’s got a good kicking game, he can kick long, he’s got exceptional vision and then he’s quick.

“We are what I would describe as a relational attack. It’s about building connections with each other and about having the ability to read off each other.”

The UBB fly-half was the highest-ranked player in Opta’s European team of the season:

If Jalibert is ‘A’, it is but a short step to ‘B’, and fielding his club scrum-half alongside him as a starter for country.

“Max Lucu is like Benjamin Button,” McNamara said. “He seems to be getting better all the time. It’s no happy accident, they make the effort to connect. They’ve been together for quite a long time. There’s a really nice symbiosis between the two [Lucu and Jalibert]. A lot of it is work, it’s connecting off the pitch, it’s preparation and it’s understanding what they see.”

Where the oven-ready, off-the-shelf solution is the automatic selection of ‘the greatest player of all time’ with his club sidekick, a lateral thinking exercise might suggest the UBB partnership with Dupont as an impact super-sub for nine and 10 in the last half-hour of the game – the period where France faded so badly against the 14-man Boks in November.

The Top 14 semi-final between Toulouse and Racing 92 illustrated in graphic terms how completely the world orbits around Dupont at his club.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) June 25, 2026

With their opponents down to 13 men on a double yellow card, Toulouse do not elect to play straight to the edges of the field through their number 10. No, they look to manufacture a score off their scrum-half directly up the middle of the park.

Even when he had the option to involve Ntamack as a creator and facilitator, Dupont chose to do it all himself.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) June 25, 2026

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) June 25, 2026

In the first instance the move ignites off the dangerous threat of hooker Peato Mauvaka in combination with his scrum-half, just as it would do a week later in the first quarter of the final against Montpellier. Ntamack runs a secondary decoy line between the two Racing centres as the main man runs straight across field and looks to pick the perfect pass and link with Pierre-Louis Barassi. On the following phase, the Toulousain 10 is pleading for the pass – arms open wide – but Dupont ignores him and kicks across to Teddy Thomas for the try.

It is the much the same in the second clip from scrum. The traditional notion of ‘function’ and ‘creativity’ has been turned on its head and the scrum-half is no longer there to serve the man outside him. Quite the opposite.

Would it work in the litmus test, a return game against the world champions this November? Would it be too one-dimensional? One thing is certain. France have two champion clubs and it needs to use the forthcoming Nations Championship to find its ‘both-and’ thinking, and banish the tyrant of ‘either-or’ ahead of the World Cup in 2027. To beat the Bokke, they need all the chicken soup for the soul they can find.