“We have to manage to do 80 minutes at a high level”, warns Céline Ferer

Céline Ferer (second line and captain of Les Bleues, victorious 40 to 5 from South Africa): “We are very happy. We put 40 points and we wanted to make a big start today. We told ourselves to do our own things, to produce our game and that’s what we managed to do: make a big start to the match and finish with a last try, so we’re quite happy. We make a big start but behind we make small hand mistakes, we are a little inside. They take over us, we also have a big team in front. Here, we are in a mythical stadium, so maybe a little pressure and it was the first opening match so we will have to let go. The South African team has big sizes. So it’s true that on the contacts, they still dominated us a lot. It was necessary to tackle them very low to be able to have them. They had a very good game. Now, we just have to manage to do 80 minutes at a high level. We have the right to have phases of hesitation, we have to manage to refocus and that’s what we managed to do since behind we were able to recover from the advance. So here it is: keep this cool head, lucidity in our game quite simply».