Maybe no gold for Wallabies at end of World Cup rainbow, but it’s not all bad

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Say … instead of doing a lucid column with a coherent theme throughout, filled with pretty patterns and all building to a light, bright conclusion, can we do it the way this Test actually was?

Friends, watching the Wallabies’ defeat in Paris on Sunday was like being a marble in a giant kaleidoscope, dropped on a trampoline.

Colour! Movement! ACTION! Noise.

Everywhere you look, throughout, there are shattered shards of red, white, blue, gold and all other colours, crashing into each other with no rhyme or reason to season, and the sound is so strong you more feel it, than hear it.

As the Wallabies step onto the field, side by side with their French opponents – all of them holding hands with wide-eyed French kids coming from all over for the occasion – more than 80,000 spectators rise to their feet and cheer for a full three minutes. The entire Stade de France reverberates to their cheers, whistles and stamped feet. While a sprinkling of us “True Blues” in green and gold do our best with Advance Australia Fair, it is La Marseillaise that near blows down the walls. Just before the actual opening whistle, three quarters of the stadium hold up the coloured cards left on their seats to make a massive red, white and blue French flag.

If this is a mere warm-up Test for the Rugby World Cup, just 10 days away, it bodes well for how glorious the actual event will be. Sitting beside George Gregan and myself in the tribunes, our host, the great former French back-rower and captain, Abdel Benazzi – now the vice president of the French Rugby Federation – says that if France had a stadium that held a million, they very nearly could have filled it for just the opening match on September 8 when they take on the All Blacks. There were 900,000 requests for tickets, even though they cost more than €500 a pop – at the current exchange rate, in our money, squillions.

Eddie Jones’ Australia were outclassed by France in their final World Cup warm-up.Credit: AP

Rugby is a big deal in France, and in this match the Wallabies were intended to be mere hors d’oeuvres for the Gallic gourmands. Could our blokes, most of them young and with little big-match experience, possibly hold on in such an environment, and give the French a shake?

And, mes amis, this is where the kaleidoscope truly came into play, because I was not taking notes, just registering impressions.

The Wallabies! They’re taking the French on, spinning it wide, charging it up the guts, ripping into them, bouncing off the ropes and giving them another one up the guts for good measure … and we are not even two minutes gone.

But the sheer power of these French in return. They’ve absorbed the Wallabies’ pressure and are now clicking through their own gears, including a couple that most rugby teams don’t have – which means their forwards handle the ball like backs, and their backs show the strength of forwards. So much power that after a try apiece in the opening quarter, for the rest of the half, the Wallabies are mostly hanging on like cats to a curtain – but they are holding on. When the full-strength French are in this mood, on their own soil, before their own crowd, many an international team would be blown off the park. The Australians weren’t.

Matthieu Jalibert is tackled by Fraser McReight.Credit: Getty

For look now …

Fraser McReight! Another tackle, and another, and another. And now the rising back-rower of international rugby has stolen the ball, before expertly flicking it out to Wallabies winger Suliasi Vunivalu who, on this mild summery evening, is truly announcing himself on the international stage.

For, seriously, where did this bloke come from? Every time Vunivalu touches the ball, an electric current goes through every seat in the ground, bringing us to our feet. He outruns the cover time and again, gets outside his man, tears away, tears ’em up, makes ground, grinds ’em down, goes again, leaps high, gets a yellow card, what?

WHAT? What for? Who knows. Yellow card. More colour. Ten minutes.

Go again.

More McReight. More Angus Bell, and Taniela Tupou endlessly taking the ball up, and both of them having storming games.

Carter Gordon, the newbie fly-half that the woman on my far left called “Mr Mullet”? True, in the first half he couldn’t have kicked a barn door closed from a metre out, but he nevertheless showed glimpses of what he will become – a jewel in the Australian rugby crown. He is not a champion yet, but he certainly has the poise and makings of one.

Which brings us to Andrew Kellaway at fullback – as busy as a one-legged man in a bum-kicking competition, mostly defusing French bombs.

Gabin Villiere dives over in the corner in front of a packed Stade de France.Credit: Getty

And new Wallabies captain Will Skelton? He fulfilled his goal of bringing the team together. No matter the situation, the Wallabies never slumped, always gathered around him and just kept going, even as the French put the pedal to the metal.

At one point in the second half, it was as if the French had smuggled Andrew Johns onto the field to unleash a blistering array of kicks, nearly as accurate as quarterback passes – right to the corners where French wingers lurked with intent. Time and again, the French either scored or nearly did. For a bit, it looked like our cats on a curtain would be blown out of the window.

But no. Two fabulous aerial tries by McReight and Vunivalu were just reward for a Wallabies side that had worked hard all match and needed to have, if not victory, at least something shiny and bright to take home to show their mothers despite a 41-17 defeat.

The conclusion?

I told you. It ain’t possible. Eleven solid rugby judges, and me besides, would likely come up with a round baker’s dozen of different conclusions. On the one hand we got thumped, black and blue. On the other, the French were frequently shocked by Australia’s derring-do. While most of our lineouts and scrums were refreshingly solid, the two lineouts we truly needed when pressing their line were frustratingly lost. We absorbed amazing amounts of pressure without cracking, only to crack just when we were bringing maximum pressure to bear.

Yes, it is the Wallabies’ fifth loss on the trot under Eddie Jones, making it an underwhelming beginning to his reign, and no spin can change that. But this was also a young side going up against the team most likely to end up as world champions, in front of 80,000 raging fans, and they really did show something.

Benazzi was stunned, on several occasions calling the Wallabies play “fabuleux” and I really would call him a good judge.

The best thing at the end?

It was the smiles on the dials of the French police, who were there in force and had absolutely nothing to do. No fewer than 80,000 people had a fantastic time, called to Paris for the “Carnival of the Cauliflower Ears”, and when they got onto the streets after the match, the only thing they wanted to do was to wave colourful flags, sing and dance and kiss the cops on the cheeks.

If this was the warm-up to the World Cup, the tournament itself is going to be red-hot.

And no, I don’t say there is a gold cup necessarily waiting for the Wallabies at the end of this rainbow – but it ain’t a black pit, either. They’ve got something.

Allez les Wallabies!

Twitter: @Peter_Fitz

Watch all the action from Rugby World Cup 2023 on the Home of Rugby, Stan Sport. Every match ad-free, live and on demand in 4K UHD from September 9.

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