"How many times in the last five World Cups have the French displayed real flair? A miraculous half-hour in 1999 and a couple of matches in 2003 is about all it comes to." Huw Richards reports

'French flair' is one of those phrases journalists love. It trips alliteratively off tongue and keyboard while expressing a widely-believed stereotype. Even the French have adopted it, albeit between inverted commas and/or in italics.

But along with Pierre Spies and Ireland - who were that bunch of body doubles masquerading as O'Connell, D'Arcy and co? - it has been the conspicuous absentee at the French World Cup.

It was most clearly not among those present on Saturday when France contrived the minor miracle of not only losing to England, but making them look ambitious and enterprising by comparison. Well might Bernard Laporte lament afterwards that his team had needed to play a little more rugby.

But then perhaps they might have done if Bernie the Door had encouraged players like Christophe Dominici and Clement Poitrenaud rather than putting out a back division who gave the impression that the only reason they were not forwards was that they were too large.

To be fair to Bernie - and one might as well, since not many of his compatriots feel so disposed at the moment - he is not exactly superbly served for this quality by the French championship.

Toulouse, yes. They'll always take on anybody who challenges them to an open game, occasionally to their cost as Leinster showed last year. Vivid memories remain of an earlier Leinster game and that pre-half time Heineken Cup Final explosion against Wasps - resisting which was perhaps Wasps' greatest defensive feat of an era when they've defined that phase of player - when they seemed to have 28 players attacking from 13 different directions at approximately the speed of light.

But Toulouse haven't been French champions for a while. The competition has been dominated by the gloomy pragmatism of Biarritz and Stade Francais.

Biarritz look glamorous - they represent a swish seaside resort and are the club of Serge Blanco, whose play lived up to his own credo of 'It is instantaneous. It is spontaneous. It is instinctive. It is spiritual. That is the real rugby'.

As an official Serge has been the voice of fat cattery. His team have been the complete opposite of his philosophy - possessing all the gifts, but playing the percentages to the point when they have made pre-Woodward England look like a Fijian sevens team.

Nothing has been duller in the Heineken than some of Biarritz's performances, nor more merited than the exasperating series of near-misses their joyless conservatism has brought them. Stade have been little better.

And have France really been that different? 'French flair' is rooted in folk memories of stylists like the Boniface brothers, Gachassin, Jacques Cantoni, Jo Maso and later stars like Blanco. But Jo Maso, as reports in the French press endlessly remind us, is 63. The image too is close to retirement.

It survives because it fits underlying Anglo-Saxon assumptions about Latins - that they're gifted but fundamentally unsound. It parallels the belief that Italian football teams are great when ahead but fold when you get on top, when the opposite is closer to the truth.

But how many times in the last five World Cups have the French displayed real flair? A miraculous half-hour in 1999 and a couple of matches in 2003 is about all it comes to.

And in the Six Nations, while they're undoubtedly the team to beat with three titles in the last four seasons, have they really played much in the way of the freeflowing rugby we assume to be their birthright?

The reality is - and I'll admit I'm biased, but you don't have to be Welsh to think this - that the most attractive rugby played in the Six Nations since the last World Cup was by Wales in their Grand Slam year of 2005.

France remain a great rugby nation. But French flair? Let's quit talking and writing about it until we see some.