Ireland v France: Keith Duggan looks at a coach who has won much - but not the loyalty of his public.
It is hard to imagine two more inscrutable rugby men than Eddie O'Sullivan and Bernard Laporte. A stranger to the ways of Six Nations theatre could visit creaking old Lansdowne today and study the clenched, implacable Irish coach and the pale and austere Frenchman without ever guessing which figure was facing the guillotine.
O'Sullivan watches his rugby team with the serene concentration of a man lost in a book on a train. Laporte squints at the action through the round-rim spectacles of the classic swot, like a mathematician vexed by some theorem. Neither man will ever indulge in the unfortunate dances of celebration that used to make poor Clive Woodward look like the biggest loser at the disco or effect the kind of showy sang-froid that has everybody lapping at Jose Mourinho's saucer.
For the purposes of today's international as a form of public entertainment, O'Sullivan and Laporte are essentially invisible players, too wrapped up in the details of the contest to even consider themselves part of the story.
It is a measure of O'Sullivan's low-key, persuasive manner that he has steered Ireland through a perilous state of public expectation to this point with hopes of a first Grand Slam since 1948 alive and well.
And the season has never been about O'Sullivan: during a Six Nations season seemingly defined by the angst of its coaches, O'Sullivan has been the epitome of calm, subtly deflecting all praise towards his players and keeping a well-oiled, settled team grounded and focused.
How Laporte must envy his Irish counterpart that relatively untroubled and uncontroversial profile. Somehow, Laporte has managed to become the only story of the rugby season in France.
In keeping with the fashionable theme of the year, the French manager has become a source of public fascination, his every call and decision loaded with the potential to set off another furious debate among the stars of old campaigns and the voluble French press critics. That Laporte guided the French to two of the last three Grand Slam titles has been forgotten with a shrug.
What is deemed to be missing from the French game is what former coach Pierre Villepreux identified - with fairly damning timing - as the element of "fantasy in French rugby" that has given it a special aura down the years. His recent comments drew an angry retort from Laporte on Sud Radio Sports, on which he promised to someday give "some answers about the things the players have told me about Pierre Villepreux".
But Villepreux's criticisms carry echoes of the famous declaration by Jean-Pierre Rives, the blond hero who led France through the good old days of the 1970s and early 1980s, that rugby was "first and foremost a state of mind". A distinct inability to get any accurate read on the mindset and philosophy with which Laporte coaches the French team has caused such open disgruntlement among former occupants of the international dressingroom.
It is sometimes hard to conceive that Laporte has been at the helm of French rugby since 2000. He is the only man, apart from Jacques Fouroux, a one-man institution in France, to be awarded a second four-year contract. After an uncertain beginning, the 2002 Grand Slam presaged a glittering era and a forceful argument that France were the stuff of world champions.
Laporte's first term was inevitably defined by that 2003 World Cup, when he seemed to have perfected an irrepressible concoction, with France's yesterdays represented by the great veteran Fabien Galthie and its tomorrows by the typically gifted, adventurous and unreasonably handsome Frederic Michalak.
But it rained on the day they played England in the World Cup semi-final and the French got mired by the brutal strength of England's peerless pack and the cold precision of Johnny Wilkinson.
Afterwards, Laporte pointed out that Woodward had been given time to experiment with various styles, from an expressive running game to the more ponderous mauling, before hitting the jackpot with the Wilkinson model.
As England faltered in 2004, Laporte won another Grand Slam, with Ireland's raid in Twickenham taking much of the sound out of Le Crunch. But complaints of indecision - he has used 24 different half-back combinations in 63 games going into this season - have trailed him. What was mere grumbling grew into open protest after France's lacklustre and arguably lucky victory over the Scots in Paris in the first match of this new season. Since then, the knives have been out.
It probably does not help Laporte that he is not part of the ex-internationals' club. He is the only French coach not to have worn the blue shirt as a player. Instead, he captained a Bègles-Bordeaux team with a notoriously hard and darkly effective front row to the national championship of 1991 and years later brought Vincent Mascato, the key figure of that Bègles trio, with him to Stade Français, which he coached to the 1998 championship.
His blue-collar background - he has spoken of his mother working 11-hour days as a cleaner for 30 years in his native Toulousian suburb of Gaillac - perhaps instilled in Laporte the toughness to rise to the top from the outside. His Stade team were both the model for and envy of France by the late 1990s.
His appointment as France coach presented someone refreshingly at odds with the louche and debonair image so closely associated with the Gallic game. In terms of movie idols, he is more Michel Blanc than Alain Delon.
Laporte burst on the international scene as a blinking worrywart, hell bent on infusing military discipline into the national team and sometimes coming across a bit harum-scarum, given to scribbling down his game notes in a touchingly minute red notebook before and during games.
Legend has it he became a nervous wreck after his car was impounded in Paris just days before the Six Nations showdown with England two years ago. His anxiety was not for the missing car, but because his notes were inside it.
He has been sparing in praise of players and has been no respecter of reputations. Thomas Castaignede reminisced that his last act as a French player was to watch a video of that afternoon's defeat to Argentina between midnight and two in the morning.
The smiling and charming Castaignede is among those who have questioned Laporte's selection policy as this season went off the rails during a thrilling game against the Welsh. At least in the first half, France were at their most delicious and authentic, as if Laporte was stung to respond to the critics.
In Dublin this week, he gave malcontents a little more fuel by opting for an untried centre partnership of Yannick Jauzion and Ludovic Valbon. But that selection was at least forced by injury to Damien Traille.
More controversial is Laporte's persistence in keeping the ephemeral Michalak on the reserves bench, giving credence to the theory that his selection policy is partly driven by a feud with Guy Noves, coach at Michalak's superb Toulouse team.
It is hard not to be drawn to such a stubborn streak. Laporte may have been at the heart of French rugby for half a decade, but he remains his own man, unmoved by other voices.
With his contract due to run until after the 2007 season, it is highly speculative as to whether even a man with Laporte's resilience can last that long.
Already the great Galthie, who retired after the 2003 World Cup exit, and Patrice Lagisquet, the suave winger who enjoyed the slick nickname the Bayonne Express and tormented hapless home countries defences many moons ago, are being spoken off as likely successors.
Lagisquet's name evokes memories of the era of Serge Blanco and Phillipe Sella: he is a gold-card member of the old boys' club that Laporte never knew or needed.
Although Laporte can give the impression that rugby is his life, he is too smart for that. A successful restaurateur and businessman, he is also a devoted family man and only accepted a second term in charge after persuasion from home.
Given the unhappynature of this campaign, it is dubious as to how attractive the next two years may seem to him now.
However, in Dublin this week he has been defiantly cool and cheerful and it is bad luck on Ireland that France are now at their most unreadable and therefore dangerous.
After curtains effectively fell on the Woodward era following Ireland's famous victory in London last year, Laporte, possibly mischievously, commented that "it was fantastic to see these great English players clap the Irish off. That was a beautiful moment. I don't think the French could do that . . ."
And you can be sure the eternal outsider of French rugby will have been burning the midnight oil devising a way to avoid just that dilemma. How his gallery greets the end result is another matter.
