LONG READ 'Red-lining France and Australia face last chance saloon in Paris'

The trees are bare and your breath freezes in wreaths around them, as if in sympathy. Snowflakes as big as crackers from a Chinese takeaway are beginning to fall all around. The grip of winter is approaching, and right now its icy fingers are winding around the throats of Les Bleus and the Wallabies.

France and Australia will meet in the last round proper of the Quilter Nations Series, and a deflating defeat for either will sound the death knell on what appeared to be a 2025 full of growth and international potential. Fabien Galthie’s side were riding the crest of a wave after dominating the champions of the previous two years in the penultimate round of the Six Nations, scoring 42 points and five tries to rout Ireland in Dublin.

Joe Schmidt’s charges were on a high after scoring six tries to storm the stronghold of Ellis Park in Johannesburg, upset the world champions and fire the first meaningful shots of the Rugby Championship. The red cockerel and the wallaby were kings for a day, but the tale has been very different since.

Australia have won one of their past seven games [against Japan] and France have lost four of their past five. It has been a sharp snapshot of lost momentum, and if you’re not moving forward, you will most certainly be falling back.

The common factor in the travails of both nations is player fatigue. Les Bleus lost impetus on their July tour of New Zealand, where the political sensitivity of the FFR/ LNR seesaw demanded a squad full of ‘B’ or even ‘C’ team players be selected. As I suggested in my November preview, Australia have suffered from the lack of depth in key positions across a protracted 15-game international season.

And as Schmidt added after the 46-19 loss to Ireland last weekend, “We don’t have massive strength in depth yet. There were 19 debutants last year in an effort to try to build a broader base of international players, but the accumulation of experience through that broader group is still in its genesis.”

The pressure on key individuals within Schmidt’s squad has become intolerable as the minutes and the number of games played racks up. From the beginning of the November tour in 2024 to the end of Saturday’s Dublin defeat, a selection of those stats reads as follows.

Galthie himself referenced the 2,000-minute, 25-game red line for selection to France’s July tour squad, while one of the key stipulations of the new Professional Game Partnership agreement in the Prem in England is player involvements should be reduced to 30 games per season. ‘Involvement’ means ‘any time [at all] spent on the field’. An iceberg of physical and mental preparation belies even an 80^th-minute substitution.

The Bath University study which underpinned the new PGP guidelines found 31 or more match involvements resulted in a significantly higher injury rate in the following season. Whether you lean towards France or England, most of the high-profile Australian players on that list are already stepping over the 25-game limit, and almost all of them have played more than 2,000 minutes.

The loss of momentum has a profound impact on teams of all kinds, inside and outside the world of rugby, and it is probably better to never have had it at all than lose it when you do. Take the peculiar case of the Australian lineout, usually run by Frost.

The peak performance of the Wallaby lineout occurred during the Lions series, even with a non-jumping second row [Will Skelton] starting in two of the three matches. Australia won 90% of their own ball and pinched more than they gave up. Since then, the lineout has begun to spring a few leaks, and proportionally it is losing more of its own throws while stealing fewer of the opponent’s than at any point in the season.

Now let’s look at Frost’s personal involvements at the lineout.

Frost was a king in the lineout during the Lions series, winning no fewer than 27 in three matches, and he would have made anyone’s combined team of the series. By the time the November tour arrived his production had slowed to a trickle, even though the Wallaby lineout effort was still going gangbusters in the games against England and Italy.

Against Ireland it finally collapsed with the skyscraper Brumby felled, and Jeremy Williams calling the shots instead. Australia lost six lineouts, five of them in critical situations in or around the 22m zone when they were poised to make a score. Three of the losses came via overthrows, which can look bad for the hooker but are more typically the result of a miscommunication between thrower and lineout skipper.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 20, 2025

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 20, 2025

Schmidt commented on the second of those two misfires in the aftermath: “[We were] in the game for the first 60 minutes and we had a lineout just down here in the corner. If we get something out of that, we’re within a score with 20 to go and we’re right in the game.”

Both throws are timing jumps at the middle/tail of the line to Williams, and there is no Irish aerial counter to provide interference on either. The two misses represent a simple lack of coordination between thrower [Matt Faessler] and receiver [Williams]. That is what happens when you do not have the depth of personnel to drop one key player [Frost] and replace him seamlessly with another. If the Springboks lose Lood de Jager, they can just slot in Ruan Nortje or Franco Mostert or even Pieter-Steph du Toit to replace him and the lineout machine keeps purring, but for Australia it is not so easy.

The other three losses were essentially replays of the same lineout scenario.

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 20, 2025

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 20, 2025

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— William Bishop (@RPvids1994) November 20, 2025

In the first of the two examples, there is no attempt made to decoy Ireland’s strongest and most athletic pilferer [number six Ryan Baird] away from the intended target, so the lithe Leinsterman and his lifting pod are free to mirror the actions of Williams at the front of the line.

In the second and third clips the Wallabies have a glaring ‘tell’: the ‘+1’ or insert is positioned level with the intended receiver – Fraser McReight at the front in the first instance and Bobby Valetini in the middle in the second. In both cases Williams is choosing to take on Baird one-on-one without looking to decoy him away from the target area, and that means easy pickings for the Dubliner. The Wallabies might as well have sent him a telegram before the throw was ever made.

To cap it all, when Frost wearily dragged himself on to the field one more time to secure possession in the last quarter of an hour, only five minutes had elapsed before he was off again – sent to the naughty chair for a high tackle following Caelan Doris’ crucial try in the 70^th minute. That was the final ironic twist in the tale of Australia’s fatigue overload, the story of their 2025 season.

Frost will once again be pulling on the green and gold jersey in the final match of an overlong season at the Stade de France this weekend. It will be his 32^nd game in the past 13 calendar months and everything in the PGP and Galthie playbooks will be crying out against it.

Frost is red-lining but the Wallaby lineout only functions when he is calling it. As he has inevitably begun to slow down the lineout stats have declined with him. He was aerial royalty in July, schmoozing easily with the very best the British and Irish Lions had to offer. Now he is in rags, begging for a rest in the corner of the town square.

France and Australia have lost all the momentum they built earlier in the year due to fatigue. As the American activist and writer Shaun King once observed, that priceless commodity is indispensable, within the world of rugby and without: “People with momentum can get so much done. Momentum is easy to lose and almost impossible to fake.”