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Analysis: France must locate very best form to spoil the show for England
La Crunch is back – but not as you know it.
This version is bigger, shinier – and veritably humming with all that’s at stake. Grand Slam deciders are winner-takes-all, but Saturday is a Women’s Rugby World Cup semi-final.
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Knockout footy on a global, legacy-defining scale as two great rugby nations pour chips on the most-scrutinised, pedestaled table in our game’s history, and then frantically empty their pockets until they’re pulling out lint.
In the most logistical sense what we’re settling here is scheduling. Technically, it’s three and a half hours at stake, because – despite what the melodramatic commentators (and they’re the worst) will claim – there is, in fact, a tomorrow for all four semi-finalists. None of our quartet go home this weekend: everyone gets another game.
Next Saturday, the bronze final will kick off at 12:30pm – before the gold at 4pm – so our winner will earn an extra 210 minutes to braid hair, jiggle knees, and let the butterflies tornado.
Only it’s so, so much more than that. Who gives a monkey’s – let alone a French sporting cockerel – about time-tabling? As an athlete, time is just another commodity you invest and sacrifice – like your body, money, and presence at your best friends’ weddings – in order to transcend it: to suspend yourself in rugby canon. Precisely when these medal-settling bouts take place doesn’t matter a jot: all that counts is not finding yourself in the wrong one.
France must be utterly sick of bronze playoffs, and the prospect of coaxing their shattered bodies back to life for 80 minutes of playing, not for a copper medallion, but out of the fear of leaving empty-handed. They’ve completed World Cup rostrums seven times before, having skirted the ignominy of fourth, and are all-too familiar with the sensation of gazing upwards with pitted stomachs.
Even as those – English, more often than not – wipe away the tears which accompany silver, Les Bleues *long* for that heartbreak – to at least find themselves within the four white lines where gold is a possibility. They are the best team to have never reached the marquee match – and are so, so hungry to put that right (although hopefully slightly less ravenous than they proved in Exeter).
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For England: contesting bronze isn’t a possibility. There hasn’t been a World Cup final without the Red Roses this millennium – and they’ve won the last 16 against their cross-Channel foes.
For John Mitchell’s women – with their resource and their talent pool and their 31-test unbeaten streak – anything other than a trophy lift will be considered a failure. So, it’s unthinkable that they’d not be stood, hearts racing beneath the roars of 82,000 at 4pm next Saturday, about to play the biggest game of their lives.
Everything quantifiable, in both the red and blue corners, tells you it’ll be France hitting the breakfast buffet early doors on 27th September.
England have 32 players from which to select, have scored six tries more than anybody else whilst conceding a meagre total of three, and have routinely had rival set pieces on toast.
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They are confident, boast home advantage, and have spent this week preparing for La Crunch – rather than recovering from the furore of La Munch. The French, meanwhile, haven’t had their number since 2018, are without both their co-captain and a key workhorse in Manae Feleu and Axelle Berthoumieu, and haven’t produced anything like their best at this tournament – not against stern opposition.
But, as ever with the world number fours – you cannot discount the wispy spectre of their occasional genius: of how they’ve finished with hisses and roars at Twickenham, the strike moves with which they carved South Africa to ribbons, or the 35 desperate Irish phases they eventually extinguished at Sandy Park.
What if Pauline Bourdon-Sansus has one of those days? Or someone shows Joanna Grisez an inch of space? God forbid Gabrielle Vernier is allowed a run-up at an outside-in line from 10 metres out…
Les fantômes de Mont-de-Marsan (the pre-season match against England in August) are banished, they insist.
“We completely lost our way,” Marine Menager has admitted, “but are a team who know how to react.” Grisez was even less concerned. “Forget it,” the apex predator purred from Sunday’s post-match presser, when asked if there was any scar tissue from that 40-6 shambles.
But the fact is – France will need accuracy, discipline, consistency, and a dollop of their most mercurial sorcery if they’re to spoil the party on Saturday. Which is to say: they’re going to need to play completely differently to how they have done for the bulk of 2025, and rely on England taking their foot off their throats for long enough to do so.
Yes, they contrived to dig themselves out of a proper hole against the Irish, but managed 34% territory and leaked 17 penalties and three yellows against the top seeds and there aren’t enough shovels on earth to solve your problems.
It’s Crunch time, and in a very real way for Les Bleues – who have dreamed for so long of a headline slot at this quadrennial festival of rugby, but only ever been booked as a support act. There’ll be moments – of course there will: shots which make you wince, and slaloms which make you ‘ooh’- but it will take the best 80 minutes we’ve seen from France since Caroline Drouin missed THAT penalty if they’re to spring the upset to end all upsets. They’re on Wafer-thin ice.
We can promise you theatre, but are pinning the jeopardy of this one on recent glimpses, and La Hunch that France will go down swinging – as they always do against the red rose.
Friday night (Canada v New Zealand) should be one for the ages, but Saturday might just be a mauling. Let’s hope they’re both belters – it’s what this tournament deserves – but recent form suggests it’s England’s lie-in to lose, and a pre-ordained case of déjà vu for Les Bleues.
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