Jean-Baptiste ELISSALDE

Biog of Jean-Baptiste ELISSALDE :

“The breed of small players is going to die out,” Jean-Baptiste Elissalde said in February 2010 at the age of 32. “I am 1.72m and have always weighed around 70 kg. Sometimes I breeze through a game but there are times when I’m put through the mangle and I am dead on my feet …”.* After a bleak year or so, he had just been recalled to the French squad as a replacement in the Six Nations tournament, a testimony indeed to France’s strength in depth. And in a rugby that was becoming more and more physical, he would again adopt the role of “the cheeky one in the band”, as he was described by Guy Novès, his coach at Toulouse since 2002. Elissalde was injured before the first match in Scotland and so would finish his international career with 35 caps and a points tally of 214.

But Jean-Baptiste Elissalde, son and grandson of French internationals*, had a good sense of humour and the gift of the gab, and could find just the right word like his father. By being wilier than most and certainly more gifted, Elissalde was more than able to hold his own at the highest level, playing scrum-half for the 2004 Grand Slam winning campaign and fly-half for Toulouse in their 2008 French championship win and the European cup final defeat in the same year. “He’s a natural,” says Guy Novès. “Playing at number nine or ten, he is capable of making intelligent decisions regardless of whether the ball is good or bad. And his size has never stopped him defending correctly.”

Elissalde only played twice for France at fly-half, for his first two caps in 2000, as replacement for Gérald Merceron. He was playing for La Rochelle, the town of his birth, at the time, coached by his father, Jean-Pierre. In 2002 Elissalde left the Atlantic coast for the great Toulouse where the competition was so strong that he missed out on the victory in the European final in 2003 and was only a replacement in the French championship final of the same year. The experience would serve him well in the long run nonetheless. Elissalde was still on the bench for the 2004 European final (defeat) but he was in the starting line-up for the 2005 (victory) and 2008 European finals, and the 2006 and 2008 (defeat) French championship finals. From 2004 onwards Elissalde became one of Bernard Laporte’s first-choice scrum-halves along with Dimitri Yachvili (14 times in the same match day squad) and Pierre Mignoni (6). In the absence of Fabien Pelous, he was even captain for the June 2005 tour of South Africa and Australia.

Elissalde’s third captaincy came as a stop-gap in September 2007 in the World Cup held in France. Les Bleus had lost the opening game against Argentina and the half-back pairing of Mignoni and Skrela had been less than convincing. For the match against Namibia, Elissalde was named in the starting line-up as captain, alongside his Toulouse teammate, Frédéric Michalak, his most regular fly-half partner for France (15 times in the starting line-up together, 6 times with one or the other as replacement). Elissalde scored 27 points, his record in a single match for France, and made the position of scrum-half his own until the end of the World Cup campaign (defeat in the semi-final against England) and the start of the 2008 Six Nations tournament when the new coach, Marc Lièvremont, began to implement his policy of favouring the new generation, Morgan Parra and Sébastien Tillous-Bordes.

Elissalde limped through his last season on half a calf muscle and a patched up adductor, missing the semi-final defeat in the Top 14 to Perpignan and not getting onto the pitch for the European Cup final victory against Biarritz. With his future already sewn up as Stade Toulousain’s backs’ coach for the 2010-2011 season, Elissalde preferred to stay on the side line at the Stade de France, alongside Guy Novès and Yannick Bru, his colleagues in-waiting.

* Équipe Magazine, 6 February 2010
** Jean-Pierre Elissalde five caps in 1980-81 and Laurent Bidart one cap in 1953