‘Injustice’ of loss to the Springboks hurts Antoine Dupont

France captain Antoine Dupont has admitted that he is haunted by the team’s exit from the Rugby World Cup.

Dupont said that he had to watch the match again to see if he was right to feel a sense of injustice.

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 ‘Injustice’ of loss to the Springboks

He appears to still believe that France were done in by the match officials calls in the one-point quarter-final loss to the Springboks.

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“In 2019, we were also eliminated by one point while we were leading by 12 or 13 points with a quarter of an hour to go, but I never watched the match again,” Dupont told Bros.

“With this one, I needed to. I couldn’t sleep, so I watched the match the next day. You always have an impression on the pitch but sometimes, rewatching the match, it’s different. It was to see if this feeling of injustice was real or not.”

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There is no getting over it

Dupont isn’t sure he will ever get over the experience of coming up just short with the whole of France behind them.

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“I will have the opportunity to win it (the World Cup) perhaps, but we have regrets over the match,” he said.

“You replay it in your head and the worse it goes, the worse it ends up going. So all you want to do is sleep and then wake up hoping that it’s just a nightmare. Unfortunately, you have to come to accept it and move on.

“When you come home in the evening, you have a taste in your mouth. That doesn’t go away. You don’t want to have that feeling again one day.

“The more you think about it, the more you delve into it, the more it hurts. Because you realize the event, from where you were.”