Simon Barnes, formerly a giant of these sports pages, once wrote that “the French would pick 15 mavericks in every rugby union team if they could”. In which case I wonder what Barnes would have made of the French team dropping a player who is arguably their greatest maverick of all.
The point — or the stereotype — is that the English historically distrust unconventional rugby talent, whereas the French cultivate it and call it champagne. In which case, the omission of Damian Penaud from the France squad for the Six Nations seems to be some kind of national identity crisis.
That nation we fell in love with? Sorry, it’s just not that beautiful any more.
Penaud’s the guy who infuriates coaches. In those precious last minutes before taking the field, when the rest of the squad are talking emotion, game plan, kick-off tactics, Penaud is the one in the corner playing chess on his phone. They say he’s a nightmare in training because you never know whether he’s switched on, and even if he is, you don’t know what wavelength that might be to. But then, come match-time, you’re still never sure what he’s going to contribute, you just know that some of it is going to be genius.
The line from Yannick Bru, his head coach with Bordeaux Bègles, is: “It is good to have one Damian [in the team] but not two.”
Now, however, France have decided to go with none. So where are the mavericks now?
This isn’t just about France, then, it is about the whole game. It is about the blanket embracing of orthodoxy.
It turns out there is little worse in the game than to be called “maverick”. Someone who goes off script? Not me, Sir.
Cipriani’s non-conformist ways were not suited to Eddie Jones’s style of coaching
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“I wasn’t a maverick,” Danny Cipriani said in an interview after his retirement. “I was a decision-maker.” But what we loved, Danny, was the non-conformist in you. OK, we’ll just not call it maverick.
“I’m not a maverick,” said Finn Russell, one of the very greatest mavericks of all, when he went on the British & Irish Lions tour in 2021 knowing exactly where expectation stood: that he was a danger, that he would go off-plan during a game and bring the whole tour crashing down around his feet because of it.
Even coaches don’t want to own up to backing maverick talent any more. If a coach embraces a maverick, they are acknowledging that they have a player who might not follow their instructions.
“I don’t view it as maverick,” Gregor Townsend, the Scotland head coach, said of the way Russell plays. “I view it as backing and making your decisions for the right reasons.”
Either Russell is becoming more orthodox, or he is just making more correct decisions
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How interesting that Russell’s development has led him to become decreasingly unorthodox. Maybe that’s a trick of the eye, though; maybe it’s just that he’s been making more correct decisions.
Back to Penaud. One of the weaknesses in his game that has been identified as a reason for dropping him is his ability to compete for the high ball: he doesn’t enjoy it and he’s the sort of player who, if he doesn’t enjoy it, then he’s not going to be doing much of it.
In the modern game, everyone wants their wings to be able to compete in the air. The likely replacement for Penaud in the French starting XV is Théo Attissogbe, who has an excellent aerial game.
The point about a maverick (even if they’d rather not be addressed in such a way) is that they don’t do what everyone else does. Penaud does utterly astonishing things regularly, yet in the eyes of the selectors, this no longer beats doing what everyone else does.
Actually, in the case of the French team, it’s not so much about doing what everyone else does, it’s more about what the Springboks do. The only person for whom Fabien Galthié, the France head coach, has a higher regard than himself is Rassie Erasmus, his South Africa counterpart.
Penaud gets a consoling pat from Galthié during the last World Cup
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If Erasmus wants high-ball specialists then, sure enough, at some point Galthié will too. Erasmus has experimented with the 7-1 bomb squad bench; funnily enough, it wasn’t long before Galthié did too.
We’ve got to the point, now, where England probably outdo the French for the maverick or unorthodox. The closest England have to a modern-day maverick is Marcus Smith, and Steve Borthwick, the head coach, has now done the maverick thing by picking him at full back.
There is something in here also about Galthié being a coach under pressure. He is blessed with as multi-talented a group of French players as there has maybe ever been — “la génération dorée” as they have inevitably been termed. It is now four years since their grand slam and it is on Galthié if they do not do more. It would not be an unusual move from a coach under pressure to start making the safe, conservative decisions — such as leaving out his maverick.
It’s not that France have completely eschewed anyone who could be described as unorthodox or an artist. The inclusion of Matthieu Jalibert makes that point. At the same time, though, the artistry and off-the-cuff skills of Jalibert are what Galthié has, for so long, been avoiding; with Romain Ntamack injured, Jalibert made himself impossible to avoid.
Jalibert scores for Bordeaux against Northampton in the Challenge Cup this month. It won’t take many mistakes for him to be back in the international wilderness
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He has to go well, though, because another curse that sport’s mavericks seem to share is the shallowness of the trust that is placed in them. It won’t take Jalibert many mistakes to find himself back in the wilderness. At some point, Penaud will surely be recalled, but it won’t take a lot of dithering under the high ball for Galthié to revert and decide that, actually, he was right all along.
There is, of course, another way to look at this, which is that Penaud’s high level of artistry has dropped of late and that if Attissogbe’s performance levels are tracking the other way, then surely he deserves a chance.
Attissogbe’s aerial prowess has earnt the Pau player, centre, the nod over Penaud
GAIZKA IROZ / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Yet I still wondered what Barnes would have made of it all — so I rang him to find out. “Ah,” he mused. “I hope this doesn’t mean that the French have realised that there’s a difference between sport and art.”
Maybe they have, though it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are better at winning.
Arctic refunds could snowball: what if City lose to Wolves?
It was hard not to be impressed by the honesty in the statement by Manchester City’s players this week, when they announced they would be personally reimbursing their fans the cost of the match ticket after they had travelled to the Arctic Circle to witness the shock 3-1 defeat by Bodo/Glimt.
The statement from the captains’ group, made up of Bernardo Silva, Rúben Dias, Rodri and Erling Haaland, said that “covering the cost of these tickets is the least we can do”. This is a reasonable point because when you think they could have opted to cover the cost of their flights, say, or their overnight hotels or any other such incidentals, the £25 for a match ticket probably was, indeed, the very least they could have done.
From left: Haaland, Omar Marmoush, Nico O’Reilly and Guardiola, applaud what remained of the 374 travelling fans after a chastening night for City
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There were 374 fans who travelled to the Norwegian north. That’s £9,350 that the squad have had to find. It wasn’t clear how many of the squad had to put their hands in their pockets, but it’d probably have set them back about £500 each. For Haaland, for instance, that amounts to less than 1 per cent of what he earns a day — or to put it another way, what he makes in ten minutes.
Nevertheless, it was a nice touch by the players to brief the public on their generosity by releasing a statement about it.
An interesting precedent for City fans, though. What happens if City go down badly to Wolverhampton Wanderers at home on Saturday? That’s a few more people to reimburse at somewhat more than £25 a go. What if they lose to Salford City in the FA Cup?
Meanwhile, those in Orlando last summer to see them knocked out of the Club World Cup by the Saudi team, Al-Hilal, might be wondering what happened to their reimbursement. And if the players embrace retrospective reimbursement, would it not be fair to get your money back for seeing them beaten by Wigan Athletic in the cup eight years ago?
If you believe in financial fair play, these are all matters that now have to be considered.