France - 51 Japan - 29 France coach Bernard Laporte has criticised his players for their lack of control in their win over Japan on Saturday.
"We won and scored six tries, but we had the opportunity to score six more and we didn't," Laporte said yesterday before the team flew to Sydney, where they will face Scotland on Saturday in their third Pool B game.
Despite the criticism, Laporte will at least be pleased that Frederic Michalak, the tournament's top scorer, who grabbed 19 points from the boot and scored one of France's tries on Saturday, should be available to him next weekend, after an X-ray revealed that the rib injury picked up by the outhalf during the game is not as bad as feared.
"An X-ray showed the rib wasn't fractured," team manager Jo Maso said. "Frederic will have a scan in Sydney to double-check the rib cartilage but our team doctor thinks it will be alright."
It still wasn't enough for Laporte, though, and he was critical of his side, saying he felt some, particularly Michalak, had approached the game as a training session.
"We started well, we scored two tries in the first 10 minutes, we were 20-6 after half an hour and playing well. We should have kept our composure and killed the game, but then we started to play an over-complicated game.
"They started to test all our backline tactics but mistook speed for haste and dropped far too many balls, 19 according to the official statistics I believe," he said. "You don't do that against a team like Japan who will never give up."
But Laporte said he had not been worried even after Japan came to within a point after scoring 13 points between the 36th and 48th minutes.
"Fortunately, we recovered our control in the second half when our forwards started to drive the ball hard and we scored three tries in the last 30 minutes."
The Japanese opened the scoring with a penalty in the third minute, but that served only to spur the French, who immediately hit back with a pair of well-worked tries, first from Michalak and then from Aurelien Rougerie. Michalak converted both to give the French a 14-3 lead.
Japan came back, however, with a Toru Kurihara penalty, but within minutes Michalak had restored the French advantage with a brace of penalties. George Konia then went over for Japan and another Kurihara penalty left the sides at 20-16 at the break.
After the break, Kurihara brought Japan within a point of France at 20-19 with his fourth penalty. But despite another penalty from Kurihara and the pick of the game's tries from Daisuke Ohata, the French held fast, with tries from Christophe Dominici, Rougerie and Jean Jacques Crenca sealing the win.
FRANCE: C Poitrenaud; A Rougerie, T Marsh, D Traille, C Dominici; F Michalak (G Merceron, 69th minute), F Galthie (capt); C Labit, O Magne, S Betsen (S Chabal, 69), O Brouzet, F Pelous (D Auradou, 62), J Poux, Y Bru (R Ibanez, 52), O Milloud, (J Crenca, 58).
JAPAN: T Kurihara; D Ohata, G Konia, H Namba, H Onozawa; A Miller, Y Sonoda; T Ito, T Miuchi (capt), N Okubo (R Asano, 69), A Parker, H Tanuma (K Kubo, 43), R Yamamura, M Sakata, S Hasegawa.
Referee: A Lewis (Ireland).
