Pfiou that was slightly tense last evening
Les bleus were being arrogant on this one, too confident, wanting to throw some champagne rugby from the word start without consuming the opponent defense (rucks and pick and goes etc), without having the base collective game on the right foot start, thinking that it would be sufficient to go through the uruguay team. It was obviously not innit ?
Making 12 changes with mainly sparring partners on the field was also not the best idea but I guess you want to preserve your main players so it does also makes sense. However, what it does do is to have a bunch of headless substitutes wanting to show off and going individual rather than collective. The performance of most of the players yesterday was really not up to scratch, Jelonch was back for the first time in a match after 6 months out for injury and we could see he was not into that game at all, Villiere is a worry, he is not at his best level, not in the right timing, Moefana had a really poor match as well when you would wait from this guy to show his first team status, etc etc
On the other end, we have been rather dominant all along the match, we are only the ones to blame for such a poor match, that was first and foremost a collective failure to apply a game plan (which I'm unsure what it was) and to be able to score points after each dominance phases.
Yeah OK Uruguay were brave and did play well in the conditions of the evening but I would not read much into their perf looking at the poor display from the french, like I would not read too much into the french performance of yesterday. France is notorious historically to not be able to play well against so called lesser teams, we never really put 80 points to one of those, always have some difficult first periods, like we are not able to put a game plan in place for those kind of game, not sure why.
The most important is the victory, I just hope we won't regret this bonus point in case we had a difficult game against Italy.