KEY POINTS:
The blame game was in top gear yesterday as a stunned France management tried to come to terms with the unthinkable.
A passionate French crowd was expected to whip Les Bleus into a frenzy and leave Argentina bewildered and confused. Instead, according to coach Bernard Laporte and his captain Raphael Ibanez, it might have had the opposite effect.
Laporte said his side, and particularly the backs, had wilted under the pressure of expectation. The bespectacled coach was clearly gutted and he didn't mind who knew.
"We were fragile, we were frenzied and we couldn't deal with the pressure," he said through an interpreter. "Some players did not play at the level they can...
"We need to find a way for the players to cope with the pressure.
"The forwards did well to gain possession but the backs were jittery... The backs were the ones that went all jittery."
Nowhere was that more obvious than under the high ball. In a staggering statistic, Argentina first five-eighths Juan Martin Hernandez kicked 23 times from 30 possessions. At least half of those were bombs. Only late in the game did France seem to come up with a strategy for defusing them.
Ibanez, who was replaced by Dimitri Szarzewski on the hour, said there were no surprises in the way Argentina came at them, "but we failed to break free of the shackles they placed on us".
Laporte has a choice to make at the pivotal first five-eighths position. David Skrela was poor and when was the last time a team won a World Cup with a poor No 10? Frederic Michalak is the obvious replacement - though he has used Damien Traille there as well - but Michalak was, if anything, worse than Skrela when he came on.
Whatever he does, Laporte needs to find a combination that can create space for the talented three-quarters, in particular Yannick Jauzion.
Only then will the French free themselves from the shackles of expectation.
Both sides have simple assigments this week: Argentina meet Georgia in Lyon on Tuesday, while France play Namibia in Toulouse on Sunday.
