There is a document somewhere in World Rugby’s Dublin offices, presumably printed on very expensive paper, which explains in exhaustive detail how international rugby must accommodate the estimated 300 million people worldwide living with colour vision deficiency (CVD). One team dark, one team light. Preferred combination: dark against white. Even the socks must contrast with the pitch.
Former World Rugby chairman Sir Bill Beaumont, a man of CVD himself, championed the whole thing with admirable sincerity. It became mandatory policy for World Rugby tournaments from January 2025, and best-practice guidance elsewhere. The rugby world nodded solemnly and agreed it was the right thing to do.
The formal rule change, and this is where the Six Nations genuinely diverged from World Rugby, reversed 75 years of tradition by making the away team change rather than the home side. For three quarters of a century, the host nation wore the alternative strip as a gesture of hospitality to travelling guests. Since 2024, that convention is gone. The visitors change. In the context of a sport that spent decades letting its elite players get concussed into early dementia whilst talking about values, abandoning this particular tradition lands with a certain bleak comedy.
French chalk white v white
The practical effect this weekend is that England are expected to wear white whilst France wear something that is functionally also white, and the entire regulatory apparatus designed to prevent exactly this has been comprehensively defeated by a vintage aesthetic decision and a commemorative capsule collection.
To mark the 120th anniversary of Le Crunch, Adidas and the French Rugby Federation have produced a special collector’s jersey drawing its inspiration from the very first France-England confrontation in 1906. The light blue, they explain, is directly reminiscent of the colour worn that day.
An elegant white collar completes the vintage silhouette. It has already sold out. It is, by the admission of those flogging it, a pale, spectral, chalky interpretation of blue so delicate it would sit comfortably in the Farrow and Ball catalogue somewhere between Borrowed Light and Skylight, filed under a paint name they would probably call French chalk white. You could recalibrate your television’s colour settings to register it as a default white.
France’s gorgeous jersey to create an unwatchable kit clash against England on Super Saturday
30 players dressed in two shades of effectively identical pale. The greyscale test, had anyone thought to apply it, would render the entire match a single undifferentiated smear. The referee will be identifying players by squad number, boot colour, and in broken play, by the language in which the front rows are grunting. This is where four years of regulatory architecture, covering jerseys, shorts, socks, patterns, numbers and the precise photometric properties of colours under floodlighting, has deposited us. A commemorative collision between chalk and chalk, in Paris, under the lights, on Super Saturday.
Serge Blanco, it should be noted, would approve of the shirt if not the situation. Blanco played his best rugby in Adidas; most of us remember the 1987 semi-final against Australia, a try so outrageous it briefly suspended the laws of physics, and the superstition among a certain type of French supporter is that France simply perform differently when the three stripes are present. This is not a testable hypothesis under World Rugby’s colour blindness guidelines, which are concerned with greyscale contrast rather than metaphysical alignment, but as working theories go, it has a considerably better recent win rate than Steve Borthwick’s defensive system.
England will be identifiable
The problem, admittedly, is not only the colours. The problem is also what England are doing inside them.
Borthwick arrives in Paris having overseen three consecutive defeats, including a historic 23-18 surrender to Italy in Rome last weekend that ended 33 matches without an England loss to the Azzurri. England contrived to lead 18-10 heading into the final quarter and then sent both Sam Underhill and Maro Itoje to the sin bin in rapid succession, leaving themselves briefly operating at 13 men. Itoje’s contribution was to slap the ball out of Alessandro Fusco’s hands at a maul, a decision so transparently illegal that even a spectator in the grip of acute deuteranopia could have called it from the upper tier. Borthwick subsequently suggested, with magnificent precision, that the problem was the players. The players declined to nominate an alternative explanation.
England will be identifiable in Paris by the following reliable indicators regardless of what colour they are wearing. They will be the side attempting a defensive rush, so mistimed it creates a gap you could park the Arc de Triomphe in. They will be the ones standing adjacent to a ruck with expressions suggesting mild conceptual confusion about the Laws of the game whilst France score through the channel they have just vacated. In the event of genuine visual uncertainty, simply locate Louis Bielle-Biarrey. He will be the one in pale blue, or possibly white, running through the space where England’s defence was supposed to be.
The socks, at least, are compliant. Everything else is a ghost story.