Ask most rugby fans to name the greatest teams in Six Nations history and you will likely get a range of answers – the early 2000s England, Warren Gatland’s first go around with Wales, either Joe Schmidt’s or Andy Farrell’s Ireland or maybe the start of Eddie Jones’s England era.

And yet for pure dominance, there is one side that often gets overlooked despite a run that tops the lot. From 2002 to 2007, France won four Six Nations crowns in six years, including two Grand Slams. Stretch to 2010 with another Grand Slam and you have a team that won a title every other year for a decade, with a hat-trick of clean sweeps for good measure.

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That success was not simply restricted to the Six Nations. While they didn’t manage the consistency of the England team that preceded them, there were still some outstanding performances against teams from the southern hemisphere – knocking an all-time great All Blacks team out of the World Cup in 2007, as well as wins in South Africa and New Zealand.

It begs the question: why does one of the most successful teams the northern hemisphere has ever produced get overlooked so often? For David Ellis, brought in as France’s first-ever defence coach by Bernard Laporte in 2000, it comes down to one thing – Jonny Wilkinson’s drop-goal.

While it did not come in the Six Nations, that sweet strike is the defining moment of European rugby in the 2000s and it came slap-bang in the middle of the peak of that French team. Ellis says: “Because you had England winning the World Cup in 2003, it takes a lot of gloss from what France did.

“They won the first-ever Six Nations Grand Slam in 2002; England had tried to do it but hadn’t been able to. Then they won it again in 2004, they won the Six Nations in 2006 having lost the first game away to Scotland and won again in 2007, only losing to England at Twickenham. Two World Cup semi-finals as well and many good victories against teams from the southern hemisphere. It was a really rich period of success.”

Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, Frederic Michalak and Dimitri Yachvili pose with the trophy after the RBS Six Nations trophy (Getty Images)

England’s crowning glory came a week after Wilkinson emphatically won the individual battle with France’s own great hope at fly-half, Frédéric Michalak, as les Bleus crumbled in the rain in Sydney. It is the defining image of Michalak for many fans on this side of the Channel, but despite the absence of a World Cup winners’ medal, the mercurial half-back possesses one of the great resumés in French rugby.

Thomas Ramos might be breathing down his neck as France’s all-time top scorer, but three Grand Slams, another Six Nations title, and four European crowns at club level is some return for Michalak.

Michalak: “Getting a measure of revenge over England was important to us”

Now coaching at Racing 92, Michalak believes part of the reason for France’s success during that time came from the willingness of the generation before to integrate the new breed in the early 2000s.

After all, Michalak was just 19 when he made his debut for France, in the same game and at the same age as Toulouse team-mate Clément Poitrenaud. Aurélien Rougerie was another to debut in that 2001 victory over South Africa, at 21, while the likes of Damien Traille, Imanol Harinordoquy and Vincent Clerc weren’t much older when they were thrown into the mix by Laporte.

All would go on to play a big role in France’s success in the following years, thanks in large part to the work of their predecessors – who welcomed them with open arms to France’s old base at the Chateau Ricard. Michalak says: “There was a good harmony between the players from the previous generation, Fabien Pelous, Serge Betsen or Raphaël Ibañez, and then the next generation.

“Most of the players understood the highest level, they had played a lot of rugby and came together for the project. When you look at the World Cup in 2003, we were very good, even though we lost the semi-final against England. The next year we played a brilliant Six Nations with a Grand Slam at the end of it, getting a measure of revenge over England. It was important for us.

“The team was strong at the set-piece and in its foundations, it had that capacity to break, with Damien Traille, Tony Marsh, Aurélien Rougerie. There was quality all over the team. French rugby was flying high in the clubs and it translated to international level.”

For as much as that team might get ignored, they were still involved in some iconic moments in the early years of the championship. Betsen’s heat-seeking missile impression against England in 2002 made Wilkinson look as human as at any time in Test rugby, while Clerc’s name will forever draw shudders from Irish fans for his last-gasp try in the first-ever rugby match at Croke Park five years later.

That year, Elvis Vermeulen’s try in the final minute of France’s final game against Scotland swung the championship their way, just as Florian Fritz had done similar in 2006 in Cardiff. Under Laporte, France twice fell to their biggest rivals on the global stage, but at European level they were top dogs. And they did it in a very un-French way.

French coach Bernard Laporte leads a France national rugby union team training session (Getty Images)

‘Mad Bernie’ with his singular look, doesn’t get the credit for how innovative he was in his approach to the game. From bringing in an Englishman from rugby league in Ellis to making discipline the foundation of the team, he made decisions that certainly would have been held against him in the event of failure.

Ellis says: “They had never had a defence coach before. One of the things that Laporte did, when he got the job for the Six Nations in 2000, was look at what Australia had done with John Muggleton and Phil Larder with England.

“He came looking for me but the interesting thing was that even though he was a character – people from the outside thought he was a crazy man – there was a lot of logic to what he said. For him, the major problem was on the discipline side; they wanted to keep the French flair but put in a lot of discipline.

“That was a big part of my remit, working on how we do that. I did a lot of communicating with referees before the game, at half-time and afterwards, in a really nice way. Eventually we got to a situation several years later… I remember Wayne Barnes saying it was a pleasure to referee the French team, which certainly wasn’t the case back in the day with (Vincent) Moscato and company.

“He was really tough on the discipline side and demanded that. The big thing was that statistics had come into it; they were analysing the errors and penalties. France were always on the hard end of a lot of the penalty counts, which doesn’t help. We worked out that if you were penalised less than ten times, you are going to win the game. It was a bit of a shock to the players but he insisted that on a regular basis, and slowly but surely that is what we built in.”

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How Jacques Brunel gave France a new edge

That focus on discipline paid off. From Ellis’s arrival in 2000 until the end of Marc Lièvremont’s reign 11 years later, France did not receive a single red card – a far cry from the violent Crunches of the 1990s. But they also introduced concepts that hadn’t been tried in the northern hemisphere, or at all in some cases.

Jacques Brunel is better known for his spells as Italy and then France head coach, but under Laporte he brought in a pod structure in attack that was unheard of in a country where playing off the cuff was seen as the only option with ball in hand. Harinordoquy was sometimes singled out for criticism for not getting involved enough and hanging out on the touchline, but that was part of the plan.

The Basque No 8 recalls: “It was quite new. Bernard Laporte had watched the New Zealanders and he wanted to put in place a tactic to use our mobile back-rowers, trying to play on your feet and keep the ball alive.

“There were some very narrow defences and we were able to enjoy quite a bit of success with kicking, whether it was for the wingers or for the back-rowers who would set up out wide. That provided us with a number of solutions.”

It paid off in big moments, none more so than when Harinordoquy was on the end of a kick pass from Biarritz team-mate Dimitri Yachvili as France sealed the Grand Slam against world champions England in 2004 in Paris. That was a day that meant just a little bit more for France, and in particular for Harinordoquy – wound up and sent into battle by Laporte.

French players celebrate victory with the trophy after the RBS Six Nations match between France and England
(Getty Images)

Harinordoquy recalls: “There was a real rivalry with them, for me it was almost personal. As a youngster, things had gone quite badly against the English, so they were the team who I didn’t want to lose to. They were always very difficult to beat and often spoiled our party.

“Then I remember I had met Lewis Moody while we were on holiday in Dubai ahead of the World Cup in 2003. We had caught up a bit around the swimming pool, it was a very pleasant moment. We’d not had much time to talk before but I came away thinking, ‘he’s a good guy, maybe they are not so bad after all’.

“Then in 2004, before the final game against England when we were going for the Grand Slam, the English press had called me ‘Hariordinary’. Bernard Laporte pulled out the newspaper before the game and said, ‘This is what they’re saying about you’. I was a bit surprised, thinking ‘what the hell?’ It got me amped up for the game and I made sure to prove a point that day. The fact that he had got the article out in front of everyone really got me up for it.”

Elissalde’s painful Cardiff memory

That Grand Slam came with a pair of scrum-halves pulling the strings. Current boss Fabien Galthié had called it quits after the World Cup and Jean-Baptiste Elissalde and Yachvili shared the scrum-half duties in the following campaign. Elissalde starred for three rounds before suffering an injury in Cardiff that allowed Yachvili to step in and close it out.

That remains a painful memory for Elissalde, who watched the final game on crutches back in his native La Rochelle. But he and Michalak provided perhaps the greatest innovation of all during that period. It was something they took from their partnership at Toulouse and was only possible because each was capable of playing both of the half-back roles, inter-changing constantly during a game.

Elissalde explains: “We had installed that at Toulouse. We said to ourselves, when we play wide, rather than running too far for nothing, we would swap positions. And we did it a bit for France.”

For opposing defences, it certainly presented a problem, but the constant turnover in the French side – in spite of their overall success – meant that it didn’t last as long as some of the other tactics. Elissalde felt that some of the coaches were reluctant to use him too much at fly-half because of his relative lack of stature in a back-line where size became increasingly important.

Pierre Mignoni and Yannick Jauzion of France celebrate (Getty Images)

At 6ft 4in and over 16st, Traille was a similar build to Harinordoquy. Centre partner Yannick Jauzion and winger Rougerie were of the same ilk. Traille says: “We had a change of strategy in terms of how we played. We had a threequarter line with Yannick Jauzion, Aurélien Rougerie on the wing, I was in the centres, it was the sort of physiques that you didn’t have before. It was the way rugby had evolved, with a lot more attacking through the middle.”

Between the focus on size in the back-line, the structured attack and the increased importance of discipline, this French team started to resemble some of the England teams of the 1990s that had so often foiled them. For all that, France being France, there was no way of extinguishing the little spark of creativity altogether.

Elissalde says: “In Toulouse we were still focused on a game of movement, Pierre Villepreux’s approach. With the national team we discovered a game where you would play three phases and depending where you were, that would influence what you did. Then again, with Fred Michalak, that wasn’t always easy.

“And it was the same for me; I was the son of a coach but we didn’t always find it easy and sometimes didn’t understand. But it was quite innovative; I think it came from the Australians and the New Zealanders. We would add our flair from time to time.”

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It is quite remarkable to think that after that decade of almost unprecedented success, France then endured their longest barren streak in Six Nations history, including their only Wooden Spoon of the last quarter-century in 2013. That only changed with Galthié’s arrival in charge of the national team following the 2019 World Cup, which coincided with a more aligned approach between the clubs and the union for almost the first time.

Traille explains: “When we were playing, if you looked at teams like Ireland and Wales in particular, they had their provinces and regions. The focus was mainly on the national team, whereas for us, everyone would be out for themselves; the league was defending the interests of the clubs, the federation would do the same for the national team. There was not the same relationship that there is today. And thankfully that has changed because we can see the impact it has made. It was not realistic for us to carry on and enjoy success with the way that things were.

“Now the players meet up two or three weeks before the first game of an international break and during the Six Nations they won’t go home for the rest weekends, they won’t play for their clubs. It was completely different for us.”

Despite those disadvantages, France were still able to dominate while everyone else also found their feet in the professional game. Now that they have caught up, can they ever be as successful again? Traille certainly thinks so.

“The current team can do much better than us,” he asserts. “This generation is incredible and it is there that you see that the league and French rugby has understood the measures that you need to put in place to have a dominant national team.”

Under Galthié, France have probably been more consistently excellent. But even with Antoine Dupont and his merry men, it’s hard to imagine they will ever match the statistical dominance of the Laporte era.

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