France’s party ended sooner than hoped, but it has been a hell of a bash

There was anger, of course. There always is on the morning after a loss like the one France suffered on Sunday night. And at Le Rugby bistro, on Rue Roquépine in Paris’s 8th district, one of the four old men standing at the bar was venting his. The referee, Ben O’Keeffe, was a fool, he explained again, it had been a deliberate knock on, he repeated. The others, who, you guess, had heard all this from him more than once already, pursed their lips, pulled on their ears and nodded in agreement, silent as Philippe Sella and Didier Camberabero and Pierre Berbizier and all the other old players in the black and white photos on the wall.

Antoine Dupont was right, the man continued, O’Keeffe wasn’t up to it. O’Keeffe, it seems, like all referees, isn’t just there to run the game, but to give the losers someone to blame after it.

There was sadness, of course there was sadness. Not the heavy kind, there is far too much of that around for anyone to feel it about anything as trivial as this. The front pages of the papers folded on the table nearby led with images of the vigil that was held in Arras for the murdered schoolteacher Dominique Bernard. Instead, the sadness was the sort you feel at the end of a party, an unavoidable sense that there was a little less to look forward to, and a little less joy to distract us from all that. It wasn’t something anyone spoke about, but it had settled across the tournament, like the grey clouds that spread over Marseille on Monday morning.

And there was sympathy, for Dupont and all the rest of them, who have, between them, done so much to revive the sport here in the last four years. Under Fabien Galthié, France’s run at the World Cup had become something close to a national project. The