When the French need to change the direction of a game, they turn to their very special player and captain, who has never had it easy in life, writes GERRY THORNLEY
THE 14th minute at Murrayfield last Sunday. France have done nothing and the Scots, already 7-0 ahead, have swept upfield through a quick tap and break by Mike Blair, who then locates Rory Lamont on the right wing. From the recycle, Scottish prop Geoff Cross takes the ball as first receiver and rumbles forward rather than shift it. That is his first mistake. His second is to run into Thierry Dusautoir.
As is often the case when the IRB World Player of the Year lines up an opponent, the crowd “ooohs” collectively. The French flanker and captain lifts Cross up slightly, drives him backwards and then, almost but not quite in the same movement, bounces to his feet and drives his legs to lead the counter-ruck.
This, according to his Irish counterpart as captain and leader from the front, is something of a Dusautoir trademark. “He’s a good size,” says Paul O’Connell, which seems like an odd starting point, but is actually a pertinent one, for at 6ft 2ins and 100kg Dusautoir is big enough and strong enough to be destructive in the contact zone while also agile enough to be effective when the ball is on the floor.
“In his tackling technique he looks like someone who did a lot of judo when he was younger,” observes O’Connell. “He has the ability to twist and turn in the tackle, drive the ball-barrier back and then spring to his feet and start counter-rucking before anyone else arrives.”
The first time O’Connell encountered Dusautoir he was suitably impressed. “I remember in the 2006 final in the Millennium Stadium against Biarritz, he came on as a sub in the second half. Wally [David Wallace] took the ball up and he was just stopped dead. I thought ‘this can’t be right. Who is this guy?’ ” O’Connell recalls with a slight smile.
Ultimately, Dusautoir made 22 of his 23 attempted tackles last Sunday – the orange-booted, twinkle-toed Scottish fullback Stuart Hogg once wrong-footing the French captain with his footwork in a counter-attack. In all of them the opponent was either stopped dead in his tracks or, on another three occasions, driven backwards. Of the five turnovers the French engineered at the breakdown, Dusautoir was the driving force or ball-winner for all of them.
“He is a very good reader of the game,” notes O’Connell, “and you’d have to be to make all those tackles. He is also a great athlete, strong and superbly fit, and has a huge work-rate. I guess he’s pretty much the complete package as a player.”
Famously, of course, Dusautoir made 34 of France’s 178 tackles in their epic quarter-final win over the All Blacks in Cardiff in 2007, and made another 22 in the final last October when also eclipsing Richie McCaw at the breakdown with another man-of-the-match performance. Perhaps not blessed with great hands, he is an under-rated carrier, who takes good lines, and three of his six Test tries have come in those two World Cup games against the All Blacks.
All of which, according to the Stade Francais coach Michael Cheika, is also typical of the man. “He’s hardcore,” says Cheika. “Do you know what one of the most remarkable things about him is? Whenever Toulouse or France are in trouble, whenever they need someone special to change the course of the game, or to stop the rot and they need someone to come up with something special, he does it all the time.
“He’s a real stand-out in that way. He has a sense for when he needs to change the direction of a game, either with a big carry or a massive hit, and there are very few players who know how to do that. He can change the momentum of a game, and that’s a characteristic of a very special player.”
“I think he will take it on himself to look after the Irish backrow,” forecasts Cheika, “and let the other two guys do what they are going to do. He’ll take it upon himself to try and dominate Seán and Jamie and Ferris, and put a marker down that they’re not going to run riot. That’s his style.”
There is, perhaps, an underlying reason for this, and it comes from the very core of his being. According to Karim Ben Ismail, a rugby writer with L’Equipe who last week gave a lecture on Dusautoir at the French Institute in Edinburgh, the thing about Dusautoir is that “nothing came easy for Thierry. He had to work for everything”.
Most websites have it that he is the son of a French soldier and Cote D’Ivoire mother, but this is not true. His grandfather Jean came from a wealthy family in northern France and was a bit of an adventurer, living in Brazil, Mali and Divo, about 100km from the Cote d’Ivoire capital Abidjan, where he owned a plantation. Dusautoir’s father Bertrand was a physics and chemistry teacher in Abidjan, where he fell in love with one of his 18-year-old pupils, Kekane.
Bertrand was relocated by the French government to Périgueux in the south-west of France, where he moved with Kekane and their children, Thierry (then 10) and his sister Wassia. In time, though, his parents separated, leaving Kekane to rear the two children, and she is the rock around which her son was built. He once said: “My mother is my model in terms of strength of will. When I’m not well, I just think about her.”
Famously, while his mother was combining studies to be a nurse with odd cleaning jobs, she brought home some food from the Red Cross, and Dusautoir, a very proud young man even as he was 12 or 13, refused to touch the food. He gave his mother 50 francs and told her to return home to Cote d’Ivoire with his sister Wassia, while he stayed in France to work and earn sufficient money to look after them.
Ultimately Kekane would become a nurse, though it was her son’s rugby career that would give the family another direction, even if originally she had banned her son from playing the game.
During the 1995 World Cup in South Africa the young Cote d’Ivoire winger Max Brito, was left paralysed after a freak collision, and so upset was Dusautoir’s mother that she forbade her 14-year-old son from ever playing rugby. Hence, though, all his friends played with a local club called Trelissac, initially he declined.
As O’Connell had once read, Dusautoir’s first sporting love had instead been judo, where he was a double brown belt. “One day, I failed a test for the black belt,” he recalled, which would remain one of the abiding regrets of his sporting life. “It was a real disappointment. I was also tired of training alone while all my friends were enjoying themselves as a group, playing rugby, so I joined them.”
Unknown to his mother, at 16 Dusautoir borrowed boots, socks and shorts to play rugby with his friends. Soon, he became one of the best players in the team, so when Dusautoir refused entreaties to graduate to Périgueux with his mates, the Trelissac fitness coach, Jean-Pierre Gautherie, who was also a kick-boxing instructor, visited his mother.
Kekane relented and gave her boy permission to play rugby. In 2001, at 19, Dusautoir joined Bordeaux-Begles on his first professional contract, prompting his mother and sister to move there too, where they still live in a suburb called Talence. When Bordeaux-Begles went bankrupt, Dusautoir moved to Biarritz. All this time, most of his club mates didn’t realise that Dusautoir was studying for six years for a degree in engineering, as an abiding passion was to emulate his grandfather Jean as an army pilot.
To finish his degree, Dusautoir had to work in a factory 50km from Biarritz. He would drive there to begin work at 7am, return to Biarritz for training and study in the evening. This was also while he was competing for a backrow place with three French internationals Thomas Lievremont (also the captain), Serge Betsen and Imanol Harinordoquy.
That didn’t stop him breaking into both the Biarritz and French team, and attracting the attention of Guy Noves and his scouts at Toulouse. They were helped by the Toulouse Airbus plant, where the club could secure a job for Dusautoir’s then girlfriend, who was also an engineering student.
His last game with Biarritz was the 2005-06 Top 14 final against Toulouse, which Biarritz won 40-13 to earn compensation for their defeat in the Heineken Cup final against Munster. At Toulouse, Dusautoir has won both another Bouclier and the Heineken Cup two seasons ago, by which stage he was the Toulouse captain.
Meantime, having scored a try on his debut against Romania in November, Dusautoir was jettisoned after a crushing 47-3 defeat to the All Blacks that month, and despite good form for Toulouse was overlooked for both the ensuing 2007 Six Nations and Bernard Laporte’s original World Cup squad.
Slightly embittered, he went on holidays with his family to Corsica. On television, he saw speculation that he might be called up for the injured Elvis Vermeulen. A week later Laporte called him.
“After that I decided to lock all my doubts and complexes in a closet and do everything to win a berth in the team. When I arrived at Marcoussis [the French national rugby centre] I decided to enjoy myself and work hard. It suddenly clicked. The coach said everybody would have an opportunity to show his worth. I believed him, worked hard and it paid off.”
After a proverbial stormer in a warm-up win over England in Marseilles, Dusautoir nailed down the number seven jersey in the World Cup, which included his virtuoso display in the quarter-final. The Dark Destroyer had arrived.
Tellingly, while Marc Lievremont may have used 82 players, nowhere featured more in his 43-match reign than Dusautoir (36 times), and while the coach has been criticised for many things his decision to make Dusautoir captain eventually looked his best one.
Essentially introverted, if not shy, for a long time he has led by example, but his relationship with the other players has not always been easy. He didn’t speak much, even in his first two years as captain of France, but he has really changed over the last year.
Despite playing every minute in the 2010 Grand Slam, there have been times when Dusautoir’s captaincy was questioned. But he became more confrontational with Lievremont after some of coach’s loose-tongued, critical post-match comments.
At a squad meeting on the Monday before the final, in response to the ex-coach’s comments about his players being “spoilt brats”, Dusautoir maintained it was one thing to say that to them in private, but not in front of the world. Their situation was difficult enough without that, said Dusautoir, who effectively took over the ship for the week of the final.
The captain, rather than the coach, even handed out the jerseys before the final before delivering another tour de force performance.
By and large, Dusuatoir gives very little away in interviews and his public persona is, in a sense, kept private. “He’s nice, he’s quiet, he’s thoughtful and a deep thinker, but also he can be easy going when he feels at ease with someone,” says rugby writer Arnaud David.
When David was telling Patrice Lagisquet of Dusautoir’s life story last week, even the French backs coach had been largely unaware of its contents.
“Thierry doesn’t say much about his story and what he’s been through,” explains David. “Everybody thinks, ‘oh he went to university, he’s a bright guy and he plays rugby’. But nothing has been given to him.”
Date of birth: Nov 18th, 1981
Place of birth: Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire.
Height: 1.88 m (6 ft 2 in).
Weight: 100 kg (220 lb; 15 st 10 lb).
Honours: Top 14 titles with Biarritz (2006) and Toulouse in 2008 and 2011. Heineken Cup win (with Toulouse, as captain).
France: 51 caps (six tries). Captain of 2010 Grand Slam and World Cup final 2011.
IRB World Player of the year (2011).
HOW OTHERS SEE HIM
DAVE ELLIS, France’s former defence coach, has known Dusautoir for several years. “I worked with him in my second coaching job in rugby union in France, at Bordeaux,” he said. “He was in the juniors then and we invited him to the squad on several occasions. He could hit hard back then and I knew he would cause a few problems in the future. There’s no emotion on his face. It’s difficult to get two words out of him. He’s the ‘Dark Destroyer’. He sits there calmly, takes it all in and when he goes on to the field he just changes into a monster.”
Imanol Harinordoquy, a backrow partner of Dusautoir’s at Biarritz and France, said of him: “He’s not a big talker. He leads by example. He’s someone we all follow out on the field.”
Appointing his captain, was Philippe Saint-Andre’s first, and easiest, choice. “The captain will be the same because of what he did as the world’s best player, for his charisma, for being a leader in a World Cup where things were complicated and his ability to bring together all the players behind him,” he said.
