France bring in Racing92 coaching brain
TRANSFER NEWS: Racing92’s Top 14-winning backs coach Laurent Labit will join the France set-up at the end of the season, the club announced.
Labit, 50, won a league title with the Parisian outfit in 2016 after successful stints with Castres and Montauban.
He will start his work alongside incoming head coach Fabien Galthie and team manager Raphael Ibanez after this year’s World Cup in Japan ahead of the showpiece tournament which France will host in 2023.
They will take over from 65-year-old Jacques Brunel who has experienced a difficult tenure since replacing the sacked Guy Noves in 2017, winning only five games in 16 fixtures.
Galthie’s appointment came after French amateur clubs showed their opposition to a foreign coach in a referendum last month, blocking Laporte’s favoured choice of Ireland’s New Zealand-born coach Joe Schmidt who spent three years as an assistant at Clermont.
Les Bleus have been drawn with England, Argentina, the United States and Tonga in a tough-looking Pool C at the World Cup.
Laurent Travers, who has coached with Labit since 2005, will remain at Racing92 and the current forwards boss has been promoted to the position of director of rugby.
Source: AFP
