AS A BOY in his native Romans-sur-Isère, Philippe Saint-André used to grab the rugby ball every evening after school and head onto the streets of his neighbourhood with his friends.
They would practice their passing and kicking or get games of lively touch rugby going, at a time when the ex-France coach recalls that he was quicker with the ball in his hands than without it.
While he loved tennis too, it was rugby that would form Saint-André and shape his life. His oval-ball journey led to the dream job after the 2011 World Cup, when he was appointed as successor to Marc Lièvremont as head coach of France’s national team.
Fast forward to the present day and the 48-year-old is relieved to be out of one of the most taxing roles in Test rugby. After making way for Guy Novès after last year’s World Cup, Saint-André has decided to take at least two years out of professional rugby.
That fatigue with the game seems such a shame in a man who sparked The Try from The End of the World, that same boy who loved to pin his ears back and create some magic for US Romans.
He is enjoying the release of pressure he has found after a four-year tenure in the hot seat with les Bleus, a time during which the French underperformed and frustrated even their most loyal supports.
Saint-André is not turning his back on the sport altogether, however, having joined together with former Munster back Johne Murphy and South African coach Johan Taylor to form PSA Academies.
The PSA Academies will run a series of summer rugby camps for players from the ages of 10 to 18 this year, based out of the world-class facilities in Tignes, where Saint-André formerly brought his France team for camps at altitude.
After being worn down by the demands of his professional coaching career, Saint-André is enthusiastic about working with young players again.
“I coached for 17 years at a high level with Gloucester, Sale, Toulon and the French team and I feel we need to pay more attention to the development of the skills, the development of children,” says Saint-André.
“The skill levels… I won’t say poor, but they’re not as good as players in New Zealand. Maybe it’s the new world. In France, all the stadiums are closed on Sundays. You have less children playing on the road, and the ball is not in their hands. It’s more difficult for players to develop.
“I have the feeling that we need to grow the quality of the technique, the skill, the quality of pass and the vision, the reactions. This is in the centre of everything for young players.”
Saint-André is referring to France specifically here, but the sentiment rings true in many rugby nations around the world.
The ex-France coach is concerned that underage rugby in his country has become too results-obsessed, citing “big tournaments at U6 and U8″ levels where teams tend to pass the ball to their biggest player as often as possible in order to win.
Saint-André believes the repercussions are felt even in senior Test rugby, with a lack of uniformly strong skills among all players he dealt with during his time in charge of France.
There’s certainly an element of truth there, but it hardly excuses France’s poor record under Saint-André. They never finished higher than fourth in the Six Nations during his tenure, and even ended the 2013 championship at the bottom of the table.
That record brings Saint-André to his next great worry about French rugby, the balance of power the Top 14 has over the national team.
The French team is not the priority of French rugby,” says Saint-André. “The Top 14 is so big and important. We realise that it’s less and less about the French player in the best teams in France, it’s more and more overseas players, more and more big stars from all over the world.”
The former Gloucester wing cites the fact that he had to field players for France even when they were not first-choice at Top 14 clubs as particularly damning.
“To be competitive with the top four teams in the world, it was not possible for us. We beat Australia twice, but each time we played New Zealand, South Africa, Wales, Ireland, we were struggling.”
Saint-André says he always cast jealous glances at Irish rugby and its system of players being contracted to the IRFU. While Irish rugby may cast similar looks at the financial might of the French game, Saint-André says we have it right.
“I am sad. I fought for the first two years as head coach. I was trying to change things to have more access to the players, because I wanted the French Federation to have maybe 30 salaries for the best players.
“For me, that is the way. After, I lost this battle and it was more a political battle than a sports battle, but to be honest I tried to fight and tried to go with my idea to change things, but it was very, very difficult.
“We need to do something, because if not we’ll be like English soccer.”
With French players not being contracted to the FFR, Saint-André points out the relatively reduced time he had to work with them on the training ground.
He highlights how Guy Novès’s squad will return to their clubs a week after facing Ireland to play in the Top 14, before coming back into camp to prepare for the meeting with Wales on 26 February. The same return to domestic duties will occur in the second ‘rest’ weekend of the championship.
Indeed, Saint-André points out that les Bleus will travel to Argentina for their June tour without players from the four leading clubs in the Top 14, who will be preparing instead for the knock-out stages of the league.
The best French players in the best four teams will stay in France to play the semi-finals and final,” says Saint-André with a resigned laugh.
“In Ireland you would not be happy if your national team went to play in South Africa and the players of Munster and Leinster stayed at home because they had the final of the league live on TV.”
Saint-André feels the top French players are being physically flogged by the huge demands of playing up to 36 games even before evening heading on their summer tour. Many of them have “more desire to go to the beach” than continue an 11-month season.
This physical toll is being most notably seen in French player’s relative lack of explosive speed, Saint-André feels.
“They play 11 months of the year and they are four weeks on holiday, after the last week of June. They start straight away into friendly games at the end of July, so the guys don’t do any speed work anymore.
“You can realise that at international level that speed is very important. Look at us against New Zealand [in the World Cup], we break them seven or eight times but one guy breaks and nobody was there for the continuity.”
All these points are made with a large degree of validity, but even still, after all is said and done, surely Saint-André should have achieved better results with the talent available to him with the France squad?
The style of play employed by les Bleus might be a regret, one thinks, given how their directness and lack of invention seemed such a far cry from the joie de vivre Saint-André brought as a player and in his early coaching days.
But even here, Saint-André focuses on the difficulties of being France coach. He argues that a lack of face time with the players meant he couldn’t drive them out of their habitual style of playing in the Top 14.
“I am a former winger and I want to play,” says the ex-Montferrand man. “When I coached Sale, when we won the English league [in 2005/06], we beat Leicester in the final.
I think the score was 45-20 and we scored four or five tries. I am for rugby and if it’s a two-against-one and 95 metres to the line, we need to play.
“For the last four years against the best teams in the world, we were in difficulty when it was about the tempo of the game. We were more secure with that Top 14 style. It’s a big scrum, drive, because that’s the style of rugby that we see in French rugby for the last ten years.”
Last year’s World Cup was a miserable ending to Saint-André’s time as France coach, as they exited meekly at the hands of a brilliant New Zealand performance in the quarter-finals in Cardiff.
Echoing the feeling in Ireland, he believes that the final Pool D clash with Joe Schmidt’s side took too much out of his team for them to be competitive a week later in the knock-out stages.
“It’s funny because you realise that the teams who had a big, big game at the end of the pool stages were in big difficulty the week after,” says Saint-André.
“It was a big battle against Ireland for 60 minutes and ended with a lot of injuries for both sides. It was a physical game and afterwards it was hard for Ireland and for us to compete in a quarter-final.”
Saint-André says Schmidt’s Ireland were “well-drilled” in his three meetings with them, pointing to their work in the contract areas as most impressive.
The former Toulon boss has only good wishes for his successor, Novès, though he refuses to comment on whether he saw any tactical developments from les Bleus in their first game under the Toulouse legend last weekend.
“To be honest, I have so many people commenting on my game for four years that I don’t want to comment on the game of Guy Novès,” says Saint-André. ”I am behind the French team, I am the first supporter of the French team, I am behind him.
“He’s the right guy to coach this team, he has all the palmarès of French rugby and I think he’s going to be a great French coach. But I know because I had it for four years, it will not be easy for him, because sometimes you have players in fantastic shape and six months later he’s not the same type of player.”
Saint-André’s era is in the past now and he worries for French rugby in the future. However, as he moves into working to produce more skillful young players, he holds some hope that les Bleus can defy what he believes are the odds stacked against them by the Top 14.
“I was player of the French team, captain of the team and I trained this country,” says Saint-André. “It was a great honour for me but I’ve said this for the last six years: our system is wrong for the national team.
“But always be careful because the national team can still beat Ireland in Paris this weekend. You never know what can happen French rugby.”
