Tommy Freeman refused to put Antoine Dupont on a pedestal as England gear up to face the world’s best player.
Superstar scrum-half Dupont brings his French side to Allianz Stadium on Saturday on the back of a huge win over Wales in the first round of the Six Nations.
In 2024, Dupont won the Champions Cup and Top 14 with Toulouse and incredibly grabbed Olympic gold when he switched to sevens at Paris 2024.
Stopping Dupont will be one of the keys for England on Saturday if they are going to have any hope of overturning the odds against a side who won 53-10 on their last trip to Twickenham.
The 28-year-old French icon is the most influential star the game has seen since Jonah Lomu ran riot at the 1995 World Cup but England wing Freeman insists he is just another player.
Freeman said: “You can’t underestimate how good a player he is, but he’s human, he’s like everyone else, you take his legs and he goes down.
“It’s all about picking things up nice and early with him, putting him under pressure, and I’m sure like any other player when you put pressure on them they start to leak a few opportunities.
“At the end of the day everyone is human, it’s rugby. They’ll have a gameplan, we’ll have a gameplan and we’ll back ours to the moon and back. They’ll do the same to theirs. We’ll give ours as best shot as we can.”
Dupont’s Toulouse put 80 points on Leicester in the Champions Cup last month – a game where Ollie Chessum made his Tigers return from long-term injury.
Chessum added: “If I had the answers, then I’d be one of the best-paid coaches in the world. I suppose we’ve just got to treat it for what he is. He’s an excellent player, but we’ve got excellent players in our team as well. We’ll bring our threats, I’m sure he’ll bring what he brings and we’ll see what happens.”
England had a clear-the-air debrief on Monday about Saturday’s 27-22 defeat to Ireland – their seventh reverse to a top-tier nation on the spin.
The last time they suffered such a bad run against the big guns was in 2006 when Andy Robinson got fired as head coach.
But Freeman is convinced their honesty session will pay off at the weekend – and they have a plan to stop Dupont.
“We were very measured and clear by the end of it,” he said. “The end goal is that everyone’s got a clear idea of what happened in the game and what we can take from it.
“There is an element of you’ve got to put your hand up, you’ve got to be honest and accountable for your actions and to be told that as well. As a squad, we’re very good at understanding these problems and we can put our hands up so we can get on with the next job. The main focus is that we take the points, move on to next week and be positive.”
