when, not if, Fiji beat France in Lyon on Saturday, Dave Ellis says he’ll break his 10-month abstinence from alcohol and pour himself a glass of old red wine.
For someone who spent 11 years as Les Bleus’ defense coach and is now in charge of Fiji’s back-row, Saturday’s clash is another highlight in the 69-year-old former rugby league miner’s distinguished career.
After playing league in England, Australia and France, Ellis was introduced to the 15-man squad by Jacques Fouroux and hasn’t looked back since the French rugby legend brought him on board with Racing.
Since those early days in Paris, Ellis has worked at the top of the club game on both sides of the English Channel, with Gloucester and London Irish in Prém and Bordeaux, Castres, Shave and Lyon in French club rugby.
In Test rugby, his resume includes spells with Tonga and Romania, where he worked under Andy Robinson, and was a part of All black people‘ coaching team that won Lions in 2005.
But Ellis is best known for his time in France, between 2000 and 2011. Working for Bernard Laporte and then Marc Lievremont, Les Bleus won multiple titles Six Nations honors and failed, by the narrowest of margins, to become world champion in his final year.
In a chaotic 2011 World Cup, which included a shock defeat to Tonga and a rebellion against Lievremont’s leadership, Ellis’ calm assurance somehow managed to get the players to stick together enough to reach the final and push the All Blacks to the finish line, losing 8-7.
Perhaps the highlight of Ellis’ time, however, was the defensive masterclass in the 2007 RWC quarter-final that trapped the All Blacks and sent them packing for home prematurely, despite losing catcher machine Serge Betsen, after whom Ellis named his Labrador, four minutes into the match.
No.8 Thierry Dusatoir took it upon himself to do double the work in Betsen’s absence and made a then world record 38 tackles in the absence of his back-row colleague.
“There are many matches that stand out, the Grand Slam in 2004 and two championships in 2006 and 2007, but the quarter-finals of the World Championship in the same year against New Zealand was special,” Ellis once recalled to this writer.
“In the first half we used one tactic that didn’t really work, so in the second we changed it and started to double attack everything. The goal was to make New Zealand throw more men into the breakdown.”
“It disrupted their attacking game and we were able to knock them out.”
It will take another Herculean effort for Fiji to blunt the attacking instincts of a French team that has made more clear breaks than any other in this tournament.
But now that he has worked with Fiji’s Top-14 players, Ellis believes he could uncork one of the best bottles of Côte-Rôtie in the Lyon region after the final whistle at the Groupama Stadium.
“I stopped drinking wine on January 2, just because of the fact that I went for a health check and my cholesterol was high. So I went on a diet and I lost 20 kilos,” he told RugbyPass.
“But when we beat France on Saturday, I’ll probably open a bottle of wine to celebrate.
“It’s quite ironic that it’s in a city where I worked for five-and-a-half years, helping Lyon get out of Pro D2 in the Top 14.”
Ellis initially joined Fiji RU to develop local buses in the islands. But he found himself back at the top of international rugby as a member of the coaching staff during the Pacific Nations Cup, and remained part of new head coach Jake White’s staff for the continuation of the Nations Championship.
Matches against France, Ireland and Italy forward, can afford a wry smile when he recalls just a few years ago when he was assisting regional side Kenilworth RFC, while also working on a project in south Leeds, Jason Robinson’s home ground, to turn Hunslet RLFC into a dual-code operation.
Like another crafty cross-country coach of retirement age, Clive Griffiths, Ellis refuses to be defined by his age.
“As soon as I got the job, I texted him (Griffiths) and sent him a photo of all the press in Fiji and a quote from Wayne Bennett’s book ‘Don’t Die With Music Inside You.’
In his short time with Fiji, Ellis has already seen a big improvement over the Pacific Nations Cup in September, when the group is mostly local and Fijian Drua players lost the crown to Japan, losing 20-15 in the final.
However, Fiji turned the tables on the Brave Blossoms a month later in Jake White’s first match, spoiling Japan RU’s 100th anniversary celebration with a 34-28 win.
“When you come to Lyon and you get all the players who play regularly for teams in the league Top 14 or the UK, you can see the difference, physically and in the conversations you have with the players, then you think, ‘wow, now that’s a different story’.
“We’ve put a lot of work into the organizational side of things and the height of the players’ attacks, I think we’re up to 92% below the sternum, ball targeting and discipline.
“Against Japan we were only penalized three times in the whole game, which is the standard we aim for.”
Fiji’s only win in 12 previous meetings with France came at the Stade de France in 2018. Semi Radradra and Josua Tuisova were the scorers on the night, with Ben Volavola scoring 11 points in a 21-14 win. Tuisova and Volavola are in the current squad, and no doubt Ellis will raise a glass to them and their team-mates if they can repeat.
