Restless, ruthless, obsessive … but Galthié has France reaching new heights

Last week the France coach, Fabien Galthié, invited a special guest to address his squad before their trip to Cardiff. And so, into this room of brawny, outsized men steps the author and philosopher Charles Pépin, who proceeds to pepper the players with gnomic rhetorical questions. “What is a beautiful team?” he asks. “What is a real team? Is it ultimately nothing more mysterious than a sum of talents? Or is it something more?”

It’s interesting, by way of contrast, to speculate on who might conceivably deliver an equivalent lecture to the England camp. You may remember that a few years ago, the guest speaker invited by Eddie Jones to address his team ahead of the World Cup was the former Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane. And perhaps there is a certain cultural divide at work here. In France, a country that has always had a healthy esteem for public intellectuals, it is sport that can learn lessons from wider society. The very opposite is true in this country: here sporting currency possesses its own insoluble and universal mystique, as evidenced by the fact that one of our most celebrated popular philosophers is a guy who used to play table tennis.

But then in many ways this is also a trait specific to Galthié himself: a coach who for better or worse has always sought to challenge his players, to provoke them, to rip them out of their comfort zone and force them to confront new problems. Before their grand slam showdown in Paris on Saturday night, there has been a good deal of talk about how a young French team will cope with this entirely new scenario: a potential first clean sweep since 2010, the sort of pressure and stress that can force players to crack.

Yet in another sense France have spent the last two years