Laporte abandons his morals

Bernard Laporte was at his home alongside the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday afternoon, about to descend from the moral high ground to the plains of pragmatism.

He was watching a club game on television when the ugly face of French rugby reared up at him. Three players were sinbinned in the space of 12 minutes during the Montferrand v Agen match, the feature game of the day broadcast live on Canal Plus. 'It is totally unacceptable,' Laporte told Sportsmail. 'I am really angry about what happened.' That evening the France coach drove one hour down the coast to Dax to watch the successful return from injury of Fabien Galthie, the scrum half who will captain his country against England this weekend. Less welcome for Laporte was the sight of the intoxicatingly named Remy Martin, a new addition to the national squad, receiving a yellow card for a late shoulder charge on an opponent.

This was going to be a test for the coach whose much-lauded stance on indiscipline led to the dropping of both David Auradou and Fabien Pelous for the recent international against Wales. He failed the test. 'No, I will not be taking any action against Martin. This was different. I think he was unlucky to be sin-binned,' Laporte said with more of an uncomfortable wriggle than a Gallic shrug. What's French for hypocrisy? By the time the French squad gathered in a Paris hotel on Sunday afternoon - by which time he knew all about the punch thrown by Olivier Brouzet at Leicester and his 10 minutes in the cooler - Laporte was not so much seeing red as various shades of yellow.

'There are different yellow cards,' he said. 'Brouzet just wanted to separate two players who were fighting. It was not brutish.' Yet, while discussing the 'Martin Johnson Affair' the night before in Dax, he told Sportsmail: 'If one of my players punched an opponent this weekend, he would not play for France next week. It would not be possible because he might do the same thing against England.' Northampton forward Brouzet will be afforded that opportunity. He is required to partner the recalled Auradou at lock not least because of an injury to Thibault Privat of Beziers.

Although the gouging, biting, butting and stamping, which used to overflow from the French domestic game into the international arena, seems to have disappeared, statistics from last weekend revealed a lingering problem. Eight top-flight matches in France yielded eight yellow cards though the ratio in England was no better with six from six Zurich Premiership games.

It is 10 years to the month since the occasion of French rugby's greatest shame when prop Gregoire Lascube and hooker Vincent Moscato were sent off in the Five Nations match against England in Paris. Lascube did a 'Fred Astaire tap routine' on the head of Martin Bayfield while Moscato butted Jeff Probyn. 'The guy was up with the birds,' was how referee Steve Hilditch described the conduct of Moscato, the so-called Beast of Begles. Laporte, Moscato's club captain then and soul mate even now, was a horrified spectator in the Parc des Princes that day. He said: 'I thought: "This is terrible". But it could not happen now. France could not lose two players again.