Pelous takes it all in his stride

Gerry Thornley profiles a French rugby giant who will make his 100th Test appearance against Ireland

If they were ever to pin caps, medals and badges on the most decorated of rugby players then Fabien Pelous wouldn't be able to stand up, much less take to a rugby field. The 32-year-old French lock on Saturday becomes only the fifth player in the history of the game to rack up 100 Tests on Saturday, and it's not as if he's been merely marking time along the way.

One day they'll surely carve a statue of him as granite-like and defined as his jaw line.

Incredibly he has been on four Grand Slam-winning French sides, not the least remarkable aspect of which is that he played every game in each of those campaigns. A true chef d'equipe, this will be the 32nd time he leads out France, and it is clear that he commands respect the way few others do.

"He has an incredible aura about him, like few other players I've ever known," says his Toulouse team-mate and sometime second-row partner Trevor Brennan. "He's not a shouter and a screamer, and doesn't talk for the sake of it, but when he talks everybody just shuts up and listens, and every word counts."

People who know him speak of a well eductated, well mannered, respectful man, devoid of arrogance and even a little humble. Pelous would not particularly enjoy the fuss that has invariably accompanied the build-up to his 100th Test. "I think it proves my capacity for durability, my robustesse," he said in an interview with L'Equipe last week.

Maintaining this self-deprecating tone, he added: "I'm not the fastest, I'm not the tallest, I'm not the biggest, I don't jump very high - average everywhere but robust for sure. At the end of my career I will have to count the number of games I have played since I made my debut at 18. After that, I think also there is the spirit. Since I was 15 years old I have often been captain of the teams I have played with. Everybody recognises in me a big capacity to make an investment."

He has also played 218 French championship games, and would long since have passed 100 Tests but for being dropped by Bernard Laporte for the summer tour to the Southern Hemisphere in 2001 as well as the ensuing autumn internationals, while he was rested for the 2003 tour to Argentina and New Zealand. Significantly, both times he came back a refreshed and better player.

A World Cup winners' medal remains about the only missing ingredient on his cv, and for the 2007 tournament at home, Pelous will almost be 34. "If I have continued after the 2003 World Cup it was not to be a link between two generations of French players but it was 100 per cent for the apothosis of reaching Stade de France in the final of the next World Cup."

To that end he will not travel on this summer's tour to South Africa (two Tests) and Australia. "For once I will need a big individual preparation which will enable me to play a 10-month season in the best condition," he reasons. "I don't have an individualistic vision of sport. I will do everything to be ready but if I realise I have no more to give then I will go, but I think I will be the first to know that."

Pelous only took up rugby at 12 when friends of his parents suggested their gangling son join a local club, Savurdun, having played football up until then. When he broke into the then first division club Graulhet, rugby was a world removed from its current professional incarnation.

"We don't play the same game anymore," he says, referring to the giving and taking of kicks and punches which was the norm in the mid-90s. I don't regret the way I learned rugby. I was educated in the culture of combat. It' s true I was a hard player, I know that, but I had to change and go in another direction."

On joining his home town club Toulouse, he studied in the city's famed rugby playing college, le lycee Jolimont - which has produced the likes of Pierre Villepreux, Jean-Calude Skrela, Emile Ntamack and Thomas Castaignede amongst others. "It was a perfect mix of hardness and intelligence," he says.

Initially a number eight, he was deemed one of France's first "modern forwards", an oft-cited example coming in his first home Test against the All Blacks in November 1995, when his flicked pass set up Philippe Saint-Andre for the match-winning try. A solid performer at the front of the lineout, he is almost as much a lifter as a catcher these days, while his strong tackling remains a stand-out trait. He maintains rugby has seen the biggest evolution of any sport in the world over the last 10 years: "Seriously, it is fantastic. When you compare the 90s with now it is funny. When I came into the French team I trained twice a week, now I train seven times a week. Rugby was a human adventure and sport was only a pretext to the human adventure."

What he calls the "third half" in reference to the postmatch bonhomie was an essential part of the game: "Now the most important thing today is the sport. I've never believed in the legend of rugby in which all players liked each other after the game."

Asked to name his best Test match opponents, Pelous names three. "Jonny Wilkinson, because he is perfect; the Martin Johnson of the last World Cup final, because he was a giant, and Keith Wood for his capacity to inspire and lift a team."

The French captain says his team know what to expect on Saturday: "Ireland is like Munster, a team who play less than the Welsh and which is able to control the game. Against England, they played an impressive defensive game. I don't think it will be very spectacular but it will be very interesting to see how the French team reacts in this difficult context. Ireland play a very real semi-final on this road to a Grand Slam - which makes it a really big test for us."

For Pelous, personal milestones are an aside, and this game will be no different from any other. The Toulouse coach, Guy Noves, once said that not only was Pelous his conduit with the rest of the team, but that he is his easiest player to communicate with before a match, and the one who needed words from his coach the least.

"I don't need to headbutt a dressingroom wall to be ready," explains Pelous. "On the day of a game, the moment I put on the jersey I know that I am ready."

Pelousfacts

Born: December 7th, 1973 in Toulouse.

Height: 1.98m (6ft 6in).

Weight: 114 kg (17st 13lb)

Clubs: UA Savardun, SC Graulhet, US Dax, Stade Toulousain.

Tests: 99 (31 as captain, 8 as a replacement, 7 tries).

World Cups: 1999 finalist, 2003 semi-finalist.

Grand Slams: 1997, 1998, 2002, 2004.

European Cup: 2003.

French Championships: 1999 and 2001.