Heymans: 'We will have to shape up'
Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:50
France made hard work of beating the Pacific Islanders 42-17 on Saturday, with their opponents playing most of the match with 14 men after Napoleoni Nalaga was red-carded.
The French ran in five tries, including one from man-of-the-match Cedric Heymans, who admitted that the Tricolours will have to "shape up" ahead of the visit by Australia next week.
Also scoring was debutant Sebastien Tillous-Bordes, who had to come on for Jean-Baptiste Elissalde when the latter was cynically head-tackled by Nalaga.
While Elissalde looked to be unconscious, he was capable of speaking after the match.
"It came out of the blue and I don't really remember what happened, only that it ended up with me being carried off," said Elissalde.
Heymans conceded that the French had made heavy weather of their victory.
"It took us a while to press home our player advantage but when we got that first try then that settled us down," said the Toulouse flyer.
"Like last week against Argentina [a 12-6 win to France] we got the job done, but against Australia next Saturday we will have to shape up."
France coach Marc Lievremont was not happy at all with the overall performance.
"In the first-half we played like we were Fiji," he remarked caustically.
"We played like we should not have done, we lost a lot of balls. We were ill disciplined and we fell into the trap of playing 'hurray rugby' [in reference to throwing the ball around at will]."
His Pacific Islander counterpart Quddus Fielea admitted that his team's ill discipline had cost them dearly, though, he could not comment on Nalaga's incident.
"It is sure that on the level of discipline, we were not as good as we had hoped we would be, but that does happen sometimes in rugby."
AFP
