books. Richard Escott, passionate about open rugby

It is in May 2022, on the occasion of A Saint-Paul-les-Dax’s big hit Richard Escott met Patricia Martinez, director of Éditions Passiflore. This feeling can only pass between these two rugby and literature enthusiasts. Several years ago, a journalist…

It is in May 2022, on the occasion of A Saint-Paul-les-Dax’s big hit Richard Escott met Patricia Martinez, director of Éditions Passiflore. This feeling can only pass between these two rugby and literature enthusiasts. For several years, an Équipe journalist dreamed that his blog, “open side”, It goes from digital to paper, and the editor has done it. After all, what could be more natural in a section that witnessed the birth and performance of such giants and geniuses as the Boniface brothers, Benoit Duga, Jean-Pierre Bastiat or Pierre El Baladejo?

Another Richard Escott book on the oval ball, we’d say, with reference to his impressive bibliography of the oval ball, one that travels the fields of France and the world in search of the most beautiful and brilliant of rugby, too bad if it doesn’t. I don’t always wear blue but often black or green. Except that, in his blog This Is a Code of Practice, Richard Escott allows himself to be more personal, more intimate, even more ferocious.

Literary fiber

If the “open side” has been around since 2011, the compilation of 51 articles extends from 2016, before the World Cup in New Zealand, to the 2023 final, won by the Springboks, which, it must be remembered, shattered only one dream. Fifteenth for France in the quarter-finals. “Their performance lacked strategic boldness and collective precision, and too many players were curiously absent from the action,” analyzes Richard Escott with the distance of a specialist journalist that always takes precedence over fan disappointment.

The literary fabric also dominates because Richard Escott, as he proudly assumes, places himself in the lineage of distinguished writers such as René Maurice, Jean Lacouture, Antoine Blondin Or Christian Montignac, without forgetting the references to René Char, Albert Camus or Julien Grac. If all these names don’t make you want to read this collection, all you have to do is start on the closed side.

Richard Escott, The Open Side, Passiflora, 185 pages, €17