To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, to lose most of your back-line to injury can be considered bad luck, but to have the captain in doubt as well begins to smack of something more than that. France's captain, Fabien Pelous, who has been suffering this week with a rib injury, was not confirmed fit until last night, only adding to Les Bleus' current air of fragility.

One French supporters' coach at the Flaminio Stadium was proclaiming yesterday that Pelous and his men have brought with them the indomitable spirit of the cartoon strip Gaul Asterix and are in the Roman capital with the same destructive intentions. But their giant forward, Abdel Benazzi, who has more than a little of Obelix about him on the field, is getting over a damaged collar bone and is only likely to appear today as a replacement.

With a lacklustre victory over Scotland in Paris, a demoralising defeat in Dublin, and the rash of injuries which has meant the coach Bernard Laporte has had to rejig his entire back-line twice, France are in dire need of a magic potion - or at least a little of the Gallic flair which is the rugby equivalent, and which has been lacking in recent weeks.

In Philippe Bernat-Salles - the sole back-line survivor from Lansdowne Road - the returning Christophe Dominici and Jean-Luc Sadourny they do at least have men who can turn a game in an instant. Sadourny, 35 this August and capped for the 69th time today, had assumed the autumn victory over the All Blacks was his last appearance for Les Bleus.

"He is one of those players that you don't notice, he's not anywhere to be seen, then paf! He comes from nowhere and makes something out of nothing," says scrumhalf Fabien Galthie, Sadourny's team-mate at Colomiers.

Today, Sadourny says, he will play merely for the pleasure of it, with no pressure to retain his place, but the same cannot be said of the outhalf Christophe Lamaison, who has been warned that there must be no repetition of the defensive frailty he showed two weeks ago.

Indeed, Laporte has not spared the team for their showing in Ireland. "In defence we were slack, they broke through a dozen times, and against a more efficient team it could have been disastrous."

If France will hope to avoid a repeat of Italy's 40-32 victory in Grenoble in 1997, the Italian trainer, Brad Johnstone, cannot afford anything remotely resembling the azzurri's defeat against Ireland here and at Twickenham two weeks ago. Each was a game of two identical halves: the first a display of solid aggression by the forwards, the second a decline into impotence in defence.

Johnstone's side have leaked tries at a rate of five a game in the 12 matches since he took over, nine of them against England. His future is, if not completely on the line, the subject of a tug of war between the Italian rugby federation, led by its president, Giancarlo Dondi - who said after the defeat by England that Johnstone will leave at the end of the championship - and the team and personnel, who support the former All Black and feel that Dondi was merely over-reacting in the style to be expected of an Italian.

"At this stage I have a contract until December but my future is in the hands of others," was all Johnstone would advance yesterday. "When I arrived in Italy I had a plan to build a team to go to the next World Cup and I'd still like to do that."

If further evidence of a culture clash he has faced were needed, it came with a question about his second row Andrea Gritti's superstitious dislike of wearing number four, which led the trainer to bury his head in his hands during yesterday's press conference.

Assuming scrumhalf Alessandro Troncon comes through a fitness test on a calf muscle, today Johnstone will at least field his strongest line-up of this championship, with Diego Dominguez making his first appearance at outhalf after a groin injury, and Christian Stoica passed fit on Thursday. Defence, discipline and the same disruptive rushes by the forwards which threatened France in Paris last year will be the key.

"I don't think the French are in the same physical condition as England," said Johnstone. "We need to play like we did in the first halves against Ireland and at Twickenham, but for 80 minutes."

His captain, Alessandro Moscardi, put it in terms more appropriate to the Coliseum 2000 years ago: "We must play until we are dead."