Paul Willemse: ‘I closed my childhood dream when I sang La Marseillaise’

In front of 81,000 people, Paul Willemse experienced an identity crisis. He was standing alongside his French teammates, minutes away from making his Test debut against Wales at the Stade de France in February 2019. This should have been a positive experience but something was not right.

“When I started singing La Marseillaise I knew in that single moment that I had closed the door on my childhood dream,” Willemse said. “I remember feeling overwhelmed with emotion. Even now thinking about it, I feel overwhelmed by all the conflicting emotions I felt that day.” He was proud, of course, but this was not how he had imagined this moment.

He was wearing blue, not green. The animal on his chest was a rooster, not a springbok. And the words he was about to sing – words he had learned only a few weeks back when he became a French citizen – were not the words of the South African national anthem.

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Willemse, now more than two metres tall and weighing 128kg, was a hefty boy who grew up in Pretoria. He cannot remember a time when he was not obsessed with rugby. He supported the Blue Bulls and idolised Victor Matfield. But he always had a clear vision of the way his journey would unfold.

Unlike his mates he never wore replica jerseys of the Bulls or Springboks, insisting that the first time he pulled one on would be as a player. When he attended Loftus Versfeld Stadium in Pretoria with a junior academy, he refused to walk through the players’ tunnel onto the field. “I’d do only when I had earned the right,” he said.

His parents divorced when he was 16. He moved with his mother to her hometown of Tsumeb in northern Namibia and