Play! Play! France-Ireland: 120 Years of Rugby

Origins

The development of rugby in Ireland and in France was hugely influenced by the cultural reach of the British Empire in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The power and prestige of that Empire facilitated the spread of rugby and other Anglocentric sports such as soccer, cricket and tennis, across the world.

Rugby spread almost immediately to Ireland; the relationship between two islands united in one kingdom ensured that Ireland was well represented through the formative years of modern sports. Trinity College Dublin was the staging post for many of the new sports on their arrival in Ireland. The first rugby club in the country was founded there in 1854. Trinity graduates were central to the spread of rugby across Ireland and in the establishment of the Irish Rugby Football Union in the 1870s. Rugby took hold in wealthier schools which – following the model of their counterparts in England – laid out pitches for their students to play the game. These boys established clubs in Ireland’s cities and towns as they grew to men and went out to work. Rugby became established as a game of the Irish middle classes, spreading to every county. An Irish international team played its first match against England in 1875 and took part in the Four Nations championship – where Wales and Scotland also played – from 1883.

The spread of rugby to France was also heavily influenced by the economic and cultural power of the British Empire. Firstly, British expatriates founded a rugby club at Le Havre in 1872 and later the Paris Football Club in 1879. Secondly, support for the game in France was fostered by an “aristocratic Anglophilia” that was epitomised by Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, who promoted the idea that the French should adopt English sport. This helped spread the game into elite French schools, leading in turn to the establishment of the first indigenous French clubs: Racing Club de France in 1882 and Stade Français in 1883. These two clubs played each other in the first ever French ‘national’ final in 1892, in a match refereed by de Coubertin. When the game spread across the rest of the country, it was driven by British expatriates and by teachers and students. Slowly at first – and then quickly – it enjoyed enormous cross-class support, especially in the south-west; it started to become a game of the people in France in a way that it did not then manage in many parts of Ireland or Britain. It fielded a national team for the first time in a test match against the All Blacks in Paris in 1906 and then later that year played England for the first time.

First Matches

Shortly before 3.30pm on 20 March 1909, the band of the Dublin Metropolitan Police struck up ‘La Marseillaise’ and the French international team ran out onto the pitch at Lansdowne Road for the first time. Soon afterwards, they were joined by the Irish team who were greeted by huge cheers. Hundreds of French supporters were in Dublin to see the first match between the two countries. They took horse-drawn carriages and trams out to Lansdowne Road as part of a crowd estimated at more than 5,000. In the end, the Irish won comfortably, but a first step had been taken in what would prove to be a magnificent rivalry.

That match was not actually the first time French rugby players had come to Dublin. That accolade belongs to Stade Français, who played against Dublin University in College Park back in 1900. That match had also resulted in an easy victory for the Irish students.

When Ireland travelled to play in Paris at the end of March 1910, it was as part of the Five Nations championship to which France had just been formally admitted. Despite the “long journey and the heat of the day”, Ireland won by five points. Irish players, officials and supporters were cheered off from the Westland Row train station in Dublin when they went to Paris via London by train and boat.

It was not long before matches became much more competitive. By January 1914, when Ireland returned to Paris, the newspapers reported “an even game” played in the snow in front of up to 20,000 people in Parc des Princes. That the French team now included players from outside Paris made it much more competitive. Ireland won narrowly, but the seeds of future French victories had been sown.

Between 1920 and 1931, France and Ireland played each other a dozen times, with Ireland winning seven matches and France five. Every match was closely fought. Despite the partition of Ireland in 1922, the rugby team continued to include players from both sides of the border. From the middle of the 1920s, the Irish played their home match against France in Belfast, drawing crowds that rose to 25,000. Still more came to see the games played in Paris: by 1928 some 42,000 people came to see a contest at the Stade Colombes. This was an annual international match that was now a hugely popular sporting and cultural spectacle. 

In the early 1930s, tensions which had grown around the rise of French rugby grew to such an extent that France was banned from the Five Nations championship from 1931. There were two basic issues at the heart of French expulsion. The first was the illicit professionalism that was deemed to be corrupting an avowedly amateur game with many stories circulating around the paying of French players. The second was the perceived brutal nature of the game, particularly in the south-west, where it was considered to have created a violence that was almost institutionalised and ritualised. For the remainder of the 1930s, France remained isolated and was not permitted to play in the Five Nations championship. The re-establishment of matches between the two countries was delayed further by the outbreak of the Second World War.

Post-World War Two

On 26 January 1946, Ireland played France in an unofficial match at Lansdowne Road. It was proclaimed by the IRFU as a “red letter day for Irish rugby”, as it marked the return of international matches after the war. France won by 4-3 and was readmitted to the Five Nations championship in 1947, but it was Ireland who enjoyed greater success in the immediate post-war years. Indeed, Ireland won the first ever Grand Slam in its history in 1948, having started the campaign with a France 13-6 victory in the Stade Olympique de Colombes.

Steadily, however, France grew in strength and won the country’s first ever Five Nations’ championship in 1954. That same year, France defeated New Zealand in a test match and in 1958 became the first country to defeat South Africa on its own soil. Then, in 1968, France won its first Grand Slam. What was apparent was that this was now “a golden age in terms of the sparkling rugby-champagne served up by the national side”.

The context for these matches in which the expansion of air travel transformed sport in the decades after World War Two was unprecedented. It made possible the development of more frequent international contests and allowed also for a dramatic increase in the number of supporters who now travelled to support their teams. Rugby internationals in Paris and Dublin offered great opportunities for socialising, with drinking, dining, singing and general conviviality adding to the sporting experience. From the very first matches between the two countries, supporters had travelled by boat and train. The speed and relatively more affordable growth of commercial air travel saw the numbers of travellers swell well into their thousands.

For clubs, too, the opportunity to travel was embraced as often as was possible. The popularity of a ‘jet-age’ French tour was enormous in an amateur era where players needed to return to their jobs. A great example of this was the 1958 Leinster tour where they flew to France and played in Toulouse, and repeated this on several occasions during the 1960s. For their part, Toulouse came back to play twice in Dublin. Many clubs undertook similar tours during these decades before the advent of professionalism.

Between 1975 and 2000, Ireland beat France only once and never managed even a draw in Paris. These were years when the max of French panache and physical power overwhelmed the Irish. In the process, many of their players became household names in Ireland as the matches were now also always on television. Among the TV audience was a man in Paris who claimed to never watch television otherwise. Samuel Beckett once explained that he loved rugby, particularly the Irish out-half Ollie Campbell, and claimed to an Irish poet John Montague that it was only for this reason that he had a television: “Only for the games and only when the Irish play.”

Club Rugby: A New Era

Club rugby in France and Ireland has been transformed by the European Rugby Champions Cup. Toulouse won the competition when it was first held in 1996 and since then have gone on to be the most successful club, winning a record six titles. Toulon (three times), Brive and La Rochelle have also been crowned champions of Europe, while six other French clubs have been defeated finalists. In Ireland, the quest to win the European Cup quickly became an obsession for the newly professional provinces. Ulster succeeded in 1999, Munster won it in 2006 and 2008, and Leinster won it in 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2018. Along the way, trips to France became iconic adventures for players and spectators alike.

The appeal of rugby in both countries has been demonstrated by the record crowds that have attended matches in the professional era. At Croke Park in Dublin in 2009, a new world record attendance for attendance at a club rugby union game was set when 82,208 watched Leinster defeat Munster in the semi-final of the European Cup. The passion for rugby in France’s heartlands is also extraordinary: when the final of the Top 14 competition is played in Stade de France, the attendance reaches 80,000; while in 2016 almost 100,000 spectators travelled to the Camp Nou in Barcelona to see Racing 92 defeat Toulon to claim the championship.

In Ireland, the boundaries shifted more slowly – but they did shift nonetheless. During the 1980s rugby matches were played on an ad-hoc basis by a growing number of Irish women who – by the end of the 1980s – numbered some 200. This led, in turn, to the establishment of the All-Ireland Rugby League in November 1992 with teams drawn from as far apart as Belfast, Dublin and Limerick, and to the establishment of the Irish Women’s Rugby Football Union. It is a simple fact that women’s rugby was not supported properly by the existing men’s teams. It is true that Blackrock Rugby Club brought the women’s team into their structure, provided training facilities and expertise, and gave their grounds for matches. But most clubs simply ignored what was happening. As Mary O’Beirne, the president of the new Irish Women’s Rugby Football Union, pointed out at the time, this was extremely short-sighted: “If more Irish rugby clubs were to become involved with women’s rugby, I feel it would be to the clubs’ advantage and widen the scope of the game.”

In the years that followed those pioneering efforts in Ireland, there were many setbacks. Something of a Golden Age dawned when an outstanding group of players profited from the general rise in interest and success in Irish rugby to claim a Grand Slam in the Six Nations in 2013. This was followed in 2014 with a semi-final place in the World Cup, thanks to a win against New Zealand, and then the Six Nations Championship was won again in 2015. Ireland also staged the Women’s Rugby World Cup in 2017.

Ireland first met France in a women’s rugby match at the World Cup in Scotland in 1994. France won by 31-0. For the following decade, France won every meeting between the two teams with some comfort, indeed Ireland regularly failed to score. It was only in 2009 that Ireland managed to defeat France for the first time and in the years that followed there were a series of outstanding matches between the two countries. There have also been a series of matches at Sevens level, between universities and schools, and between Irish and French clubs. The growth is clear: more players, more teams, more media exposure and bigger crowds. But the legacy of discrimination also remains undeniable in the ongoing difference in so many aspects of the rugby experiences of Irish and French men as against those of Irish and French women.

To The Future

The story of the rugby rivalry between France and Ireland is remade with every season. The pioneers who organised the first matches could not have imagined the extraordinary impact of their deeds and the generations of players who have followed in their wake. Their legacy extends far beyond sport. Technological change – the invention of aeroplanes, radio, television and, more recently, the Internet – has pushed the two countries closer together by facilitating more frequent matches to be played and watched. That players and coaches find new homes in each other’s countries is a very modern tale. It is testament to the globalised nature of modern sport in a new millennium. It is also testament to a shared love of play and a cultural exchange that binds together Ireland and France. This is a history that has been many decades in the making. It is rooted in individual and collective experience that has benefitted both countries. And it seems certain that this is something that will deepen in the coming years.