France head coach Fabien Galthie has dismissed any accusations that his side were arrogant in a sloppy performance that condemned them to a 26-25 loss to England in round two of the Guinness Six Nations.
Arriving at Twickenham’s Allianz Stadium in high spirits following a 43-0 dismantling of Wales in round one, Galthie’s side will bemoan their total of 27 handling errors, some of which when a try would have been guaranteed had a catch been made.
While the greasy conditions can be blamed for Les Bleus’ uncharacteristic performance, there were occasions where passes were forced when they were perhaps not necessary, as well as exhibition-esque offloads that are not traditionally befitting ‘Le Crunch’.
When quizzed after the match whether this was a sign of arrogance by his team, Galthie was blunt in his response.
“Not at all,” he responded when asked. “It’s not their style. They’re not at all an arrogant team.”
With that said, he did identify what his team will need to do to remedy those errors going forward.
“We need more consistency in open spaces and maybe we didn’t need to score immediately but maybe wait for one more ruck.
“It’s part of what we do, it’s part of the work that we do. We are an ambitious team, I think we demonstrated that again tonight.”
France captain Antoine Dupont could not hide his frustration post-match and feels his team-mates could have scored multiple tries in the first-half which would have likely put the game out of sight.
The scrum-half himself was guilty of one of those errors as he spilt a pass from Thomas Ramos with a clear run to the line ahead of him.
“I’m feeling very frustrated, of course,” the Toulouse superstar said.
“Especially with regard to the first half- we could have scored two, three more tries, we didn’t. We reached seven-all at the end of the first half and they took advantage of the opportunities that they had. We could have still done better. We didn’t somehow, which makes it very frustrating.”
