France bring in big gun consultants in bid to break World Cup duck

With less than 30 days to the start of Rugby World Cup 2025, the clock is ticking to a difficult day for France coaches Gaëlle Mignot and David Ortiz, when they have to cut their 38-player extended squad to 32 for the tournament in England.

Ortiz said in an interview the two coaches gave to the FFR website in June that the 32-strong travelling group would be finalised “by the beginning of August”, when the third and final training block got under way at French rugby headquarters in Marcoussis.

And that made the second block of training, in the Alpine ski resort of Tignes in mid-July, a crucial fixed point in French preparations, both physically and technically.

‘This Energy Never Stops’ – Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025

‘This Energy Never Stops’ – Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025

“World Cup preparation remains a special event,” Mignot had explained a month previously. “It’s an event that must mark our group. There are 38 players today who have been chosen to do this preparation. A group of 32 will fly to the World Cup. We really want to make these moments rich and intense.”

That week in Tignes – when they trained at Stade Faugère, at 2,160m above sea level the highest rugby pitch in Europe, and on the Grande Motte glacier, another 1,400m or so higher up a nearby Alp – was about more than boosting red blood cells and improving oxygen flow in the thin mountain air.

Yes, there was time, too, to relax. After putting their bodies through hell at high altitude, the players relaxed on a spa day.

But that wasn’t all. It was about more than cohesion and building on an already strong team spirit built over three years since the current coaching duo took charge shortly after the last Rugby World Cup in New Zealand.

It was more, even than to stand them in good stead for their opening World Cup match against Italy at Exeter’s Sandy Park, which is rather lower down at around 30m above sea level, on Saturday 23rd August.

This previous World Cup tournament saw France secure the third place bronze medal for the seventh time in nine editions of the tournament.

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“We have analysed a lot of our last three years, along with our last Six Nations and we have identified areas to work on and improve,” Mignot told Midi Olympique recently.

Those areas: attacking rucks, defensive exits, and tactical kicking.

And the national team coaches – who have routinely pitched Les Bleues as ‘outsiders’ for the title – have turned to experts in their field from the ProD2 and Top 14 to bring their approach and ethos into a long, ongoing training camp setting. It was a logical decision.

“The idea was to bring in outside people who bring a fresh, new approach. Bringing [different approaches] into a World Cup preparation, which can be very long, has been important,” Mignot explained.

Former international referee Alexandre Ruiz, now head coach at ProD2 side Soyaux Angoulême, was the obvious go-to for improvements to the speed and effectiveness of France’s offensive rucks.

He has spent his days off from pre-season with his club to work with Les Bleues on contact skills and the ground game, where France have struggled at times in recent years.

This is old ground for Ruiz, who held the same responsibilities in his first professional coaching job as defence and discipline coach at Montpellier – he was in post when the Hérault club won their first-ever Top 14 title in 2022, and his stint there coincided with a marked drop in penalties conceded.

And they called on the services of another Montpellier stalwart, Jérémy Valls, for his input on the kicking game. That’s an impossibly broad area for one consulting coach to cover, even for a France squad that’s together for three camps across three months prior to the tournament in England.

According to Ortiz, however, there’s one specific aspect that Valls has been tasked with improving – namely kicking as a genuine attacking option, “[to] help our scrum halves really use this form of kicking for more than just ‘dispossession’. [Valls is] giving our players a lot of tools in this area.”

And who better than Toulouse defence coach Laurent Thuéry to work with the squad on exit strategies? The Top 14 champions had, by some distance, the best defence in the French championship as they raced to their 24th French title. Toulouse conceded just 462 points in 26 regular-season matches last season, at a try-rate of two per game. The next best defence was Pierre Mignoni’s Toulon, who shipped 595 points in 26 domestic outings.

Crucially, the principles Thuéry expounded on defensive exits were, Ortiz said, ‘fairly simple’. He added: “In women’s rugby, in the championship, we don’t always have this strategic dimension, so we thought it would be interesting to be able to call on a Top 14 expert to give us tools and help us improve.”

France will find out how ready they are for Rugby World Cup 2025 when they face Six Nations champions England, one of the big favourites to lift the new trophy, at Mont-de-Marsan, on Saturday 9th August.

The goal of all this work on very distinct areas is not to transform France’s game. As with altitude training, particularly for little over a week, the benefits are relatively small. But marginal gains matter.

France missed out on a Grand Slam at this year’s Six Nations by a single point, losing to England in an 85-point thriller in London, having been 37-10 down midway through the first half. Better French kicking, quicker rucks, more effective exits may have changed the face of that match.

Mignot summed up the importance of that World Cup warm-up game in the columns of Midi Olympique. Having been coached in those areas by some of the best in their field in France, she said: “We want to test ourselves against the best. That’s the only way we’ll know where we stand.

“We know it will be an important step in seeing what we’ve achieved and what we still need to work on. The World Cup will be long, and we still have time to put things in place.

“But there is a real desire to play England because we know very well they are the ideal opponents to see where we stand in the areas we have targeted.”

Mignot and Ortiz may repeatedly claim to be ‘outsiders’, but – on their watch – France are leaving no stone unturned in their bid to break their Rugby World Cup duck.