Nick Mallett believes that Fabien Galthie is taking plenty of inspiration from Rassie Erasmus and not just for his decision to go with the 7-1 bench split.
France went with the tactic for their encounter against Italy and it paid off as they hammered the Azzurri 73-24 in Rome.
It remains to be seen whether Les Bleus’ boss will repeat the trick when they visit Dublin next weekend to take on Ireland in the likely Six Nations title decider, but it would not surprise Mallett given Galthie’s apparent “love” for Erasmus’ methods.
Galthie’s ‘trial’
The former Springboks head coach was joined on the Boks Office podcast by Jean de Villiers who “can’t see them going 7-1 again”.
However, Mallett reckoned that he was simply “trialling it”, possibly with a view to using it again.
As the 68-year-old said, Galthie was “just seeing [how it worked] and having a bash”, before adding: “I think he really loves what he sees Rassie doing.”
Mallett thinks that it is not just the move to having more forwards on the bench which Galthie has taken from Erasmus but other areas of the French game as well.
“He’s copied him a lot with his kicking game, he’s copied him a lot with the defence, with this out-to-in defensive system that they’ve used on a few occasions,” he added.
“Most importantly, the bench is very unusual. People would complain about us doing it and suddenly France [do it].”
French rugby is stacked with huge forwards and, although they also have a number of special backs, De Villiers reckons it “makes sense” to make best use of their power up front.
With a number of their main decision-makers behind the scrum also absolutely key to how Les Bleus operate, the ex-Boks skipper thinks it is better that they stay on the field for the whole match.
Dupont and Ramos too important
“If you analyse it, they never take Dupont off, and [Thomas] Ramos the same. If you’re not going to go with [Matthieu] Jalibert [at fly-half]… then the 7-1 could actually make sense,” De Villiers said.
“They’re not really going to make any changes to their starting backline. They don’t want to take Dupont and Ramos off especially, so if you have someone covering all of those…
“They have got some proper forwards. The effect of the 7-1 split is if you’re utilising it. So many times, guys go 6-2 split but then they don’t utilise it – they bring a forward on in the 70th minute.”
