For a moment, a brief, flickering moment, you just wondered whether it was all about to come crashing down. Scotland had just scored one of the great tries, off the back of a twisty blistering run from Blair Kinghorn, which had begun well back in his own 22, and went in, out, one way then the other, deep into the French half.
Matt Fagerson carried the ball on and all of a sudden there was Tom Jordan, slipping away from Gaël Fickou like he was shrugging off a wet raincoat, to score. France were a man down, Scotland were two points up, and Finn Russell was staring down the conversion. And then – pop! – the referee, Matt Carley, punctured the bubble and told Russell that actually Kinghorn had just been in touch.
Related: France win Six Nations title after Moefana’s double sinks Scotland
It was as close as the Scots came all game. But if the French deserved to win this championship for their performances over the balance of all five games, the 35-16 scoreline flattered their performance in this fifth.
It didn’t help that it felt so much like the French had come for a coronation instead of a match. They had kitted out the stadium with 18 arc lights, 24 flame throwers, 30 cheerleaders, a celebrity DJ, a few hundred fireworks, 40,000 flags, a shirt that stretched the height of the lower tier of the grandstand, and a 100m-long banner, which a team of a hundred volunteers draped across the pitch before kick-off.
Half-time featured a 10-man string section, a platoon of 36 drummers and, floating on a platform 20m above the grass, Louane (no, me neither), premiering her new single, Maman, which will be the French entry in this year’s Eurovision song contest.
Which must have seemed like a good idea when they scheduled it, but then the TV executives possibly didn’t stop to consider the possibility that their team would be a man down and clinging on to a three-point lead at the time. The main problem was the Scots didn’t seem to be much enjoying their own role designed for them all this, which was to play the Washington Generals’ role in games against the Harlem Globetrotters, and get beaten.
You suspect it will be one of those defeats which the coaches will tell the players to remember well so they can use the recollections this time next year, when the French come up to Murrayfield.
The French, one of the great rugby teams, didn’t play very much great rugby. They turned the game into an eighty minute study in the art of the rolling maul, and for long stretches the match resembled an all-in bar brawl in Montmartre after midnight. It was an object lesson in the other side of French rugby, more la bête, less la belle. The polite way of saying it is that they had identified a weakness in Scotland’s maul defence and were determined to exploit it, but it’s maybe simpler to admit they had decided their best bet was to rough the Scots up for 40 minutes then bring on a fresh set of forwards to do it all over again in the second half.
Well there’s more than one way to skin a game of rugby, and Shaun Edwards will be delighted with the way his side defended. Seven of the team made at least 10 tackles out there and in the second half, when the Scots, with nothing left to lose, came pouring forward, they conceded only three points.
And the records fell. Thomas Ramos got his one first. He kicked two penalties and a conversion in the first 25 minutes, which was all he needed to overtake Frédéric Michalak and become his country’s all-time leading points scorer. Louis Bielle-Biarrey followed him when he scored a try in the 43rd minute. It was his eighth in the championship, which is one more than Jacob Stockdale managed in 2017, when he had a breakthrough season that seems to have led exactly nowhere. The Scots could be forgiven for pointing out that Bielle-Biarrey was only level with their own wing Ian Smith, who scored his eight in just two games against France and Wales back in 1925.
Bielle-Biarrey’s try was actually made, ironically, by Russell, who threw a wonderful back of the hand offload towards Fraser Brown, who missed it. Romain Ntamack gathered in the loose ball and charged downfield, passing to Bielle-Biarrey for one of the easier finishes. Soon after, France sent on the heavy mob off the bench, so Scotland never really recovered from the blow.
One record was left unbroken, though. The French will have to wait to see Damian Penaud score the one more try he needs to go past Serge Blanco at the top of their all-time list. It wasn’t Penaud’s sort of match, he struggled to find his way into the game, and was subbed off at one point to allow Julien Marchand to come on and scrum for Peato Mauvaka after he had been sent to the sin-bin for head-butting Ben White.
Well, that one can wait, along with the flying tries and fizzing passes and flickering off-loads. After coming second four times in five years, the French will settle for the title, this time, and be happy with it, sure in the knowledge that their best is still ahead of them.
