South Africa will arrive at the Stade de France on 13 November to find France without many of their top stars for the Nations Championship, and it couldn’t have come at a worse time for Fabien Galthié.

The top line

If New Zealand against South Africa is the greatest rivalry in rugby, South Africa against France is the bitterest. It has been since Marseille in 2022, when France won by four, and the Boks went home seething, and Paris in 2023, when a one-point quarter-final ended a home World Cup.

The next instalment is a Friday night at the Stade de France on 13 November, in the Nations Championship round that decides who goes to Twickenham, and France’s team sheet currently reads like a hospital ward bed allocation list.

Matthieu Jalibert, Thomas Ramos, Emmanuel Meafou, Thibaud Flament, Demba Bamba and Lenni Nouchi are out for the whole thing, whilst Julien Marchand and Régis Montagne are doubtful, which in the week before a Springbok Test is a polite way of saying they’re not playing.

France went south in July without their Toulouse spine and won anyway, and the plan was always to arrive in November with the first-choice side intact for Fiji in Lyon, South Africa in Paris and Argentina a week later. Instead, Galthié has three weeks, a side rebuilt around what’s left, and the one opponent that punishes a weakened tighthead more than any other in the world.

Quality lost, not depth tested

Put bluntly, this isn’t a test of French depth, because France have 40 Test-quality players and will field 23 of them whatever happens. What they can’t field is the four or five men on that list who have no equivalent in terms of sheer quality.

Jalibert has been the best attacking ten in the Northern Hemisphere, arguably the world, over four seasons by breaks, tries and assists; Ramos is the second playmaker who lets the ten play flat, because somebody behind him can still run the field; Meafou is 155 kilos of scrum ballast nobody else in France can provide; Montagne, if he’s gone, is a tighthead with no Frenchman within a yard of him; and Flament is the lock who does a back-rower’s running for 80 minutes, a menace with ball in hand.

Here’s the thing about South Africa by comparison: the Springbok squad has depth of player, which everyone knows, but key is the sheer depth of quality, which is the bit that matters in a week like this. They have two interchangeable front rows that would each start for most Test sides, a second row where losing a man means another Test lock steps in rather than a club one, and a bench that arrives at 50 minutes with no drop in standard.

France’s depth is real at nine, ten, 12, 13 and in the back row, but at tighthead and in the engine room the drop from first choice to second is a long one, and South Africa are the side most likely to exploit it.

Jalibert changes the shape, not just the name

The plan before the injuries was a Bordeaux axis, Jalibert at ten with Yoram Moefana and Nicolas Depoortère outside him, playing flat and fast and through the hands, the ball going wide early and the forwards arriving late. Without Jalibert that axis loses its conductor, and what replaces it is a hybrid of Toulouse halves and Bordeaux centres.

Dupont and Romain Ntamack at nine and ten bring a different game altogether, kick-heavy, fewer handling pieces from the French half to the try line, strike off turnover and set-piece, and Moefana and Depoortère will be asked to play a rhythm they’ve spent two seasons playing against.

Galthié will most likely stick with the two of them for experience, but the pressure from behind is real. Fabien Brau-Boirie made three line breaks and 16 tackles for Pau on Sunday and scored an intercept try from 35 metres, and Émile Gailleton has been close to the shirt for a year, with an outstanding try-scoring record. I

f the Bordeaux pair don’t take to the Toulouse rhythm against Fiji, one of those two starts against South Africa, and nobody in France would call it a gamble.

Tighthead is the hole South Africa will find first

Montagne has been outstanding when fit, and the gap to the next man is the single biggest problem on the list. Bamba’s absence removes the obvious cover, so Dorian Aldegheri starts, and Aldegheri is a technician who wins the hit and pincers in at an angle rather than a power scrummager, which works beautifully when the timing’s right and comes apart when it isn’t, as it did in Toulouse on Sunday before Ugo Mola took him off.

Georges-Henri Colombe, who replaced him, gave up the scrum penalty at 80 minutes that nearly cost Toulouse the game. Whoever gets the shirt will be scrummaging against Ox Nché or Gerhard Steenekamp, with Thomas du Toit or Wilco Louw to come, and he’ll be doing it without Meafou behind him.

That last point is the one the pundits will miss. A tighthead’s hips and angle are his own, but the drive comes from the five behind, and 155 kilos pushing straight is what has let French tightheads look better than they are for two seasons.

Take it away, and the scrum becomes a technical contest between a Frenchman who’s second choice at his club and a Springbok front row that’s been built as a system since 2018, and South Africa will go there in the first ten minutes and keep going there until the referee gives them something.

Experience over form, and the Ollivon question

With Nouchi gone and Flament’s engine missing from the second row, the selection logic shifts from form to miles on the clock, and the big call is where Charles Ollivon goes. The first option is France’s own loose forward Holy Trinity as nature intended: Ollivon, Grégory Alldritt and François Cros as the back row, with Mickaël Guillard in the second row and Cameron Wok, Scott Staniforth or Hugo Auradou alongside him.

The second is the old trick: Ollivon to four, where he’s played before and where he already takes more lineout ball than any other French player, Guillard beside him, and Oscar Jégou on the left flank with Cros on the right and Alldritt at the base.

The second keeps three world-class back-rowers on the field at once and costs France a specialist lock; the first keeps the engine room honest and leaves Jégou, who scored and made 15 tackles for La Rochelle on Saturday, on the bench. Against a Springbok pack that will go after the scrum first, the specialist lock has a strong case, but the lineout, for the record, was never all Flament’s; Ollivon and Cros take more of it between them, Jégou is a superb jumper in his own right, and all three are still standing.

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What France do lose at the lineout is the lifting. Meafou doesn’t jump, he’s too heavy to get off the ground, but at 155 kilos he’s the forklift that puts everyone else in the air, and whoever replaces him will lift the same jumpers a foot lower.

There’s one plus on the horizon. The formidable frame of Anthony Jelonch is slowly getting back to game time, seven minutes and a tackle off the bench in Toulouse on Sunday, but he’s been out forever and a unit whose size takes a while to get up to operating temperature. November may be a week or two too soon.

Cros made 17 tackles on his 50th Champions Cup appearance on Sunday in a side playing with 14 men for an hour; Ollivon remains one of the most dangerous try-scoring forwards in Test history, and Alldritt has been the heartbeat of this pack since 2019. Between the three of them, they’ve been in the room for Marseille and for the quarter-final, and that’s the point of picking them.

The team

France (probable): 15 Théo Attissogbe, 14 Louis Bielle-Biarrey, 13 Nicolas Depoortère, 12 Yoram Moefana, 11 Aaron Grandidier-Nkanang, 10 Romain Ntamack, 9 Antoine Dupont (c), 1 Jean-Baptiste Gros, 2 Peato Mauvaka, 3 Dorian Aldegheri, 4 Scott Staniforth, 5 Mickaël Guillard, 6 François Cros, 7 Charles Ollivon, 8 Grégory Alldritt.

Where it leaves France

Fiji in Lyon on 7 November first, which is the game to settle the new shape, then South Africa six days later, then Argentina at the Stade de France on the 21st, with the finals weekend at Twickenham from the 27th. Three weeks to bolt Toulouse halves onto Bordeaux centres, find a tighthead and rebuild a second row around a flanker, against a Springbok squad that’s spent two years being built for exactly this kind of week.