Dupont produces his best on biggest stage but South Africa deliver the pain

Off comes the scrum cap. The Stade de France is slowly emptying: of people, of noise, of hope. Antoine Dupont trudges across the turf, dazed and directionless, hands clasped to his head. This is a place he knows and a feeling he does not. He drags his blue jersey up over his face, but the tears do not come yet, and so he pulls it down again. For perhaps the first time on a rugby field, Dupont has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing.

They broke his face, and then they broke his heart. It will be of little use to him to know that he has played a starring role in perhaps the greatest game ever played. It matters not that over the last few weeks he has won over more converts to this team and this sport than any man since Jonah Lomu. The 73 passes he made – almost four times as many as any of his teammates – will feel like they were for nothing.

The irony here is in that in the biggest game of his life, Dupont gave a performance worthy of it. There was lots of talk earlier in the week about whether France needed to protect their talismanic scrum-half and his fractured cheekbone. In the end, it was Dupont who ended up protecting them: covering the gaps, keeping them moving, guarding the ball as if it were a precious treasure.

And of course Dupont knew that he had a bullseye on him. There was something faintly droll about the many pronouncements in the buildup that South Africa would “target” the France No 9. Oh, you’re thinking of targeting Dupont, are you? Genius. Well, in that respect, you can join pretty much every team that has played against him since he was a child.

This is, after all, a player who has grown up with a spotlight on his face. Who knows instinctively that wherever he goes, every pair of eyes in the room