Dupont produces his best on biggest stage but South Africa deliver the pain

Off comes the scrum cap. The Stade de France is slowly emptying: of people, of noise, of hope. Antoine Dupont trudges across the turf, dazed and directionless, hands clasped to his head. This is a place he knows and a feeling he does not. He drags his blue jersey up over his face, but the tears do not come yet, and so he pulls it down again. For perhaps the first time on a rugby field, Dupont has no idea what he’s supposed to be doing.

They broke his face, and then they broke his heart. It will be of little use to him to know that he has played a starring role in perhaps the greatest game ever played. It matters not that over the last few weeks he has won over more converts to this team and this sport than any man since Jonah Lomu. The 73 passes he made – almost four times as many as any of his teammates – will feel like they were for nothing.

The irony here is in that in the biggest game of his life, Dupont gave a performance worthy of it. There was lots of talk earlier in the week about whether France needed to protect their talismanic scrum-half and his fractured cheekbone. In the end, it was Dupont who ended up protecting them: covering the gaps, keeping them moving, guarding the ball as if it were a precious treasure.

And of course Dupont knew that he had a bullseye on him. There was something faintly droll about the many pronouncements in the buildup that South Africa would “target” the France No 9. Oh, you’re thinking of targeting Dupont, are you? Genius. Well, in that respect, you can join pretty much every team that has played against him since he was a child.

This is, after all, a player who has grown up with a spotlight on his face. Who knows instinctively that wherever he goes, every pair of eyes in the room will be trained on him. This is exactly as he likes it. On the pitch, he wants you to come at him, to get so close that he can see the name of the company that made your gumshield. Because the closer you get, the more it’s going to hurt when he takes you out of the game.

This much was apparent from the opening minutes of this overwhelming, overpowering, operatic match. There are certain extremely rare occasions in elite sport when you realise, even as it’s happening, that nothing will ever quite be the same after this. I’m writing this about half an hour after full time and it still feels wrong to talk about that game in the past tense. It was a game that seemed to warp time around it, that unfolded at a speed and intensity that was genuinely hard to process in real time. The scoreboard felt like a clock. Cheslin Kolbe charged down a conversion in a match his side won by one point.

There were offloads too quick for the naked eye, blitz tackles that materialised out of nowhere. People will be writing and talking about this game for generations. It’s over now. But somehow it will never really end.

And right in the eye of the storm: Dupont. Pretty much every time the ball left his boot in that first half a kind of poison seemed to sweep through the South African defence. Dupont’s boot is a dictionary, a foot with all the sophistication and versatility of a tongue. There was a dainty kick over the top in the first minute that led to the opening try. A tapped penalty and vicious feint to draw in Siya Kolisi and put Peato Mauvaka over. Endless popped passes, swerved passes, passes over heads and through traffic.

But around him, the waters were rising. Under relentless defensive pressure, France were beginning to grind themselves to a stop. The artistic kicking game that had ripped the Springboks to shreds in the first half was barely seen in the second. Now it was a story of survival, of closing the gaps and protecting the ball. Still Dupont barely put a foot wrong. And let that be his legacy from this game: a game elevated and enriched by his presence, but one he couldn’t win on his own.

And this is the devil’s deal, right? Individuals can change games, but teams win and lose them. The magnificent South Africa were the ultimate proof of that. You strive for four years, put a plan together, beat the best in the world, and none of this protects you from heartbreak. “We have to be ready to suffer,” Dupont had predicted on the eve of this game. Buton Monday morning he will awaken with the sort of pain for which nobody is ever truly prepared.