PARIS -- A Tricolor hurled down from the upper deck of the Stade de France after the final whistle was a suitably Gallic verdict on the opening match of the 2019 Six Nations.
While nothing is more prized about this venerable competition than its continuing capacity for the unexpected, one Frenchman doubtless acted for most of his compatriots in feeling that one can have too much of a good thing. Seen from outside, the Stade de France looks like an outsize flying saucer drawn from the imagination of some 1970s science fiction cartoonist, and this match had more than a touch of fantasy about it.
We know, of course, that double-figure comebacks are much more common than they were and that Wales were responsible for the two largest revivals, overturning 13-point deficits here in 2001 and at Twickenham in 2008, by winning teams in tournament history. Still more vivid is the memory of the revival here in 2005 which was the vital step towards that year's gloriously unexpected Grand Slam. It was also a happy anniversary for Wales, 50 years to the day since JPR Williams and Mervyn Davies won their first caps. Yet that Wales fought back to win from 16 points down at the break was as unlikely as the complete French dominance which came before.
So Wales move on to face Italy, with coach Warren Gatland's prediction that victory in Paris was the first step towards a championship in his final season with Wales still valid. An equally reliable prediction is that he won't let his players forget that first half in next week's camp in Nice.
Lord knows what Jacques Brunel, the France coach, will say to his players. The competence that brought that lead gave way to devastating error in the second half.
Wales showed a formidable will to win. They can hail the power and opportunism of George North, who extended his lead as the decade's top scorer by first snapping up a fumble by Yoann Huget -- in retrospect the key moment, as France's lead, already cut by Tomos Williams's score after a break by Josh Adams, dwindled to a mere two with 25 minutes still to go -- then intercepting a loose French pass to restore Wales's lead once and for all with eight minutes left.
For the best part of a decade France had been the Six Nations missing link, the dog that does not bark in the night -- or on matchday afternoons. They had spent almost the whole of the 2010s reminding us that mediocre is a French word. So a certain wariness tinged a broadly optimistic mood in both the French media and at the Stade before the match.
Given that this weekend's fixtures are the last of 2018's in reverse, one might have expected a degree of continuity in the opening fixture of the 2019 tournament. For Wales, yes, with nine starters the same, including the entire front row. For France, an emphatic non. Three forwards -- one from each line -- and not a single back from the team who started at Cardiff in March.
But what has in the past been interpreted as madness looked more like method in Jacques Brunel's matching of a back division drawn entirely from Toulouse and Clermont, first and second in the TOP14, with a set of forwards whose dimensions suggest that the international game may not have to wait much longer to see its first one-ton pack.
Attention naturally enough focussed on the debutants: 19-year-old rugby dynast Romain Ntamack, joining wing Damian Penaud as one of two sons of famed rugby fathers (Emile and Alain, respectively) in the threequarter line -- and the outsize lock Paul Willemse, a Junior World Cup winner as a South African. Something new, something borrowed, one might say of Les Bleus.
The set was completed by something which, if not exactly old, is undoubtedly mature -- the Clermont half-back pairing of scrum-half Morgan Parra, a 30-year-old who made his debut as a teenager and whose periodic omissions have generally been welcomed by France's opponents -- and the 29-year-old Camille Lopez. Long-time club partners, they had somehow only played once previously together for France.
Brunel's charges showed themselves capable of doing several things well at once in a first half which finished with them 16 points out. Heavy rain may have been preferred to the snow falling on the British Isles by the Welsh fans who made it to Paris bearing tales of cancellations and delays, and to ground authorities who still recall the postponement against Ireland in 2012, but threatened to dampen not only them but the atmosphere in a stadium several empty blocks short of a capacity crowd.
The military band entrusted with two of the best anthems in world sport set the tempo for the first half by slowing Hen Wlad Fy Nhadau to funereal pace before a rousing La Marseillaise brought the stadium back to life. Parra's left boot, box-kicking shrewdly, was soon in evidence, as was a Welsh propensity to fumble.
France kept control when it mattered -- a sustained attack starting on the left, working its way across the field three times in all before Louis Picamoles on the right stepped inside two Welsh tackles and just made it to the line. Yoann Huget, who had started that assault, was the beneficiary 20 minutes later when a superb back-handed offload by flanker Arthur Iturria sent him on a curving run to the left corner for a try, which he celebrated with a military salute to the crowd.
The sole comfort accorded Wales was that while Parra's tacking kicking was impeccable, he was fallible from the tee, missing both conversions. But this, and the denial of a try to Liam Williams after the TMO spotted a knock-on, seemed of marginal importance by half-time when France enjoyed that apparently conclusive 16-0 lead. Lopez had landed a short-range penalty after taking the kicking duties from Parra, then a 40-metre drop with the last kick of the half. They went off, presumably to chew gum, to exultant cheers. Little did they or we know.