Maxime Lucu will start for Les Bleus instead of the injured Antoine Dupont with Charles Ollivon leading the side in the absence of the influential scrum-half against Italy in the crucial Rugby World Cup group game.

Shaven-headed half-back Lucu and abrasive flanker Ollivon, both 30, grew up among around 7,000 other habitants in 'Saint-Pee' in the rugby-mad Basque Country, near to the Spanish border and inland from Biarritz and Bayonne, two giants of the sport in France.

They started playing together as youngsters for the local Saint-Pee Union Club whose senior men's team now feature in the ninth tier and includes Maxime's older brother Ximun.

"I didn't really dream of being a professional rugby player back then as it was for other people," Lucu told AFP.

"Saint-Pee was a village, our parents played for the first-team in Federale 3 (the now 7th tier) at best.

"Dreaming of going pro was for those who played for Biarritz or Bayonne.

"Our first dream was to play in the Saint-Pee jersey, like our parents did together," he added.

Ollivon joined Bayonne's academy as a 15-year-old but now plays for Toulon on the Cote d’Azur and was France captain under Fabien Galthie until suffering an injury two years ago.

Lucu joined Bayonne's bitter rivals Biarritz aged 18 before moving to Bordeaux-Begles up the Atlantic coast in 2019.

In July 2022, the pair featured for Les Bleus together for the first time during a two-Test tour in Japan.

It came more than a decade on from lacing up their boots together as children at the Stade Municipale, a stone's throw away from a bakery selling the local delicacy, the Basque Cake, and surrounded by fields filled with sheep raised to make ewes' milk cheese.

"We didn't think at all they would get to the level and it's never happened to the club," Charles' dad Jean-Michel Ollivon told AFP.

"Getting to the professional level is already huge, but then the national team is unthinkable," he added.

- 'Excitement' -

Four months later, the pair from the village on the banks of the Nivelle river, lined up for France against Japan again.

The World Cup hosts strolled past the Brave Blossoms with Ollivon's first-half try, set-up by Lucu, one of the highlights in Toulouse.

"That move, they did it hundreds of times as youngsters," Michel Sein, their junior rugby coach at Saint-Pee, told AFP.

"Seeing it in an international match, it was the high point," he added.

This weekend, Saint-Pee will be on the world's stage with Lucu and Ollivon's France needing to avoid defeat to Italy in Lyon to guarantee a quarter-final spot.

Former World Rugby player of the year Dupont is expected to return from his cheekbone fracture for the knock-outs with France among the favourites to lift the Webb Ellis trophy.

"As Charles' friend since a young age, we registered as players for the first time at the same time and now playing a first World Cup game with him as captain and me as a starter, it's an important moment for us," Lucu told reporters this week.

"They're things that matter when you've been friends from a young age.

"I don't want to put too much negative pressure on myself, and make the most of the moment because it's an important moment for me and my career.

"I feel more excitement than the negative pressure," he added.

rap/iwd/pi

© Agence France-Presse

On a recent evening in the mountain city of Taif, the Saudi women's national team ran through a one-touch passing drill ahead of a game against Pakistan, the latest in a series of friendlies intended to give the players some much-needed match experience.

The squad only formed two years ago and entered the FIFA rankings in March, at 171st place.

That milestone followed a string of firsts last year, from an inaugural international match against the Seychelles -– a 2-0 win –- to the establishment of a domestic women's premier league and a formal bid to host the 2026 AFC Women's Asian Cup.

All told, it has been a head-spinning few years for Saudi women who weren't even allowed to attend football matches until January 2018, let alone play at the professional level.

Yet 22-year-old midfielder Layan Jouhari told AFP she and her teammates were measuring their progress "one step at a time", even as they nurture ambitious long-term goals like playing at the World Cup one day.

"I watched the previous World Cup before this just out of curiosity and interest, but this year's World Cup was different," Jouhari said.

"I watched it with a different perspective, like these are now my opponents."

- Reforms and scepticism -

The eager Saudi players are standard-bearers for broader changes afoot in Saudi Arabia, a conservative petro-state trying to open up to the world while shifting away from fossil fuels.

In recent years, key restrictions that made the kingdom a magnet for criticism from women's rights activists have been lifted, although critics argue that legal discrimination remains in place in areas like divorce and child custody, and that women are frequently ensnared in an ongoing crackdown on dissent.

A FIFA+ documentary released last month tracks how the national team has seized on new freedoms, contrasting the hostility its members once received for pursuing a "masculine" sport with today's new era of deep-pocketed government support.

A press release for the film also highlights fans of the team outside Saudi Arabia, notably a social media post from the Pele Foundation describing its first FIFA match as "a historic day not only for you, but for everyone who loves football".

But not everyone is keen to fully embrace the Saudi football project.

Talks this year about the Saudi tourism board sponsoring the World Cup drew criticism from co-hosts New Zealand and Australia as well as US star Alex Morgan before FIFA announced in March no deal had been reached.

Monika Staab, the first coach of the Saudi national team who is now technical director, told AFP that critics would benefit from seeing the changes in Saudi Arabia up close.

"Someone who is not knowing what is happening here, I always recommend, come here to Saudi, have a look -– witness yourself what is happening," she said.

- On a mission -

For many national team players, football was a fact of life well before Saudi Arabia began championing women's sports under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman's Vision 2030 reform agenda.

"Football has been around in my family for as long as I remember. My older sisters used to play football and they made me fall in love with the game," said Bayan Sadagah, the 28-year-old team captain.

The new opportunities, however, have led her to consider quitting her day job as a nurse so she can focus on "one path".

The influx of international stars to the men's game gives added inspiration.

Jouhari described obsessing over videos of French star N'Golo Kante as a girl.

Now they are both midfielders for the club team Ittihad -- Kante on the men's side, Jouhari on the women's -- and Jouhari can't wait to meet him, though she says she "might lose my words" when it actually happens.

For Staab, who has worked with women's programmes in more than 90 countries, the focus is squarely on what her own players might achieve.

"I'm only interested in women's football because I want women's football to grow, I want women's football to develop -- that is my mission," she said.

rcb/kir/dhw

© Agence France-Presse

A new study published in the journal Scientific Reports now finds that physical responses -- including heart rate, breathing and the electrical conductivity of skin -- synchronize between audience members at classical concerts.

Individuals who rated more highly for personality traits such as openness were more likely to synchronize, while those with neurotic dispositions were less likely to align.

"When we talk about very abstract things such as aesthetic experiences, how you respond to art and to music, the body is always involved there," Wolfgang Tschacher, a psychologist at the University of Bern who led the research as part of the Experimental Concert Research project, told AFP.

This theory is known as "embodied cognition" -- the idea that the mind is not only connected to the body but that the body influences the mind -- which, while arguably intuitive to lay people, has been controversial in scientific circles.

To investigate, Tschacher and colleagues observed 132 audience members across three classical concerts.

All three played the same string quintet pieces: Ludwig van Beethoven's "Op. 104 in C minor," Johannes Brahms' "Op. 111 in G major," and "Epitaphs" by the contemporary composer Brett Dean.

The authors used overhead cameras and wearable sensors to monitor the participants, who filled in questionnaires about their personalities before the concert, and whether they enjoyed the performance and what their mood was afterward.

Overall, they found statistically significant synchronization on several measures -- people's hearts beat faster or slower during the same musical passages, as did their levels of "skin conductance."

Skin conductance is closely related to the body's flight or fight response. When it's high it indicates a state of arousal and can be linked to goosebumps on the skin; when it's low we are in a state of relaxation.

The cameras even caught alignment of body movements, which the authors wrote "appears noteworthy, as the audiences of all concerts were seated in dimmed lighting" and spread out due to the pandemic.

However, though people's breathing rates aligned, they did not actually inhale and exhale in unison.

- The power of music -

As one might expect, people whose personality types indicated, "a person who tends towards fearful behavior, warding off things, being more depressed," in Tschacher's words, were less likely to synchronize -- but so too were extroverts, which might seem counterintuitive.

"Extroverted people are very social, they tend to intermingle with people, they want to be in power, and they want to have a certain self-value," he said, adding he had seen this result in previous research too. While extroverts are outgoing, they focus less on the music.

For Tschacher, the findings are more evidence in favor of the "embodied cognition" theory and also help explain why public parades or military marches help build cohesion between participants.

And he expects the effects would be "even stronger" in other musical genres.

"There are additional reasons that people will synchronize in pop concerts, people move, they dance, and that's that is synchronized by the music and that would give even clearer results," he said.

ia/bgs

© Agence France-Presse

Here are some of the best known:

- Harold Pinter (2005) -

British playwright and political campaigner Harold Pinter, master of the pregnant pause, won in 2005 for what the Swedish Academy called his ability to get at the truth "under everyday prattle".

His more than 30 plays dealt with domination and submission, threat and injustice and gave rise to the adjective "pinteresque" -- used to describe the sense of menace running through a work and those silences that speak volumes.

Never afraid to speak his mind, Pinter called US President George W. Bush a "mass murderer" and British Prime Minister Tony Blair a "deluded idiot" for invading Iraq.

- Dario Fo (1997) -

Italian playwright, director and performer Dario Fo skewered people in power in a series of satires that were staged worldwide, the best known of which are "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" and "Mistero Buffo" ("Comic Mystery").

The "Accidental Death of an Anarchist" was based on the case of an Italian railroad worker who mysteriously falls out of a Milan police station window while being falsely accused of terrorism.

"Mistero Buffo" was his one-man political telling of the Passion of the Christ, which the Vatican denounced as "the most blasphemous show in the history of television".

- Samuel Beckett (1969) -

The avant-garde Irish playwright produced one of the 20th century's most popular plays, "Waiting for Godot", in which as one dubious Irish critic memorably put it, "nothing happens, twice".

Born a minority Protestant in a stifling censorious Catholic Ireland, he fled to Paris in the 1930s where he remained for the rest of his life, writing in both English and French.

"Godot" is the existential tale of two bickering tramps who wait in vain for someone called Godot who never shows up.

Literary critics have long argued over who or what Godot actually represents, with interpretations ranging from God to death.

- Eugene O'Neill (1936) -

The father of modern American theatre brought the grim dramas of everyday life to stages whose staple had previously been vaudeville.

Murder, suicide and insanity were recurring themes in his work, which included the autobiographical "Long Day's Journey into Night" and "The Iceman Cometh".

In his Nobel acceptance speech, O'Neill hailed the prize as "a symbol of the recognition by Europe of the coming-of-age of the American theatre...worthy at last to claim kinship with the modern drama of Europe."

- Luigi Pirandello (1934) -

This Italian playwright was chased out of a Rome theatre a century ago when he staged his absurdist masterpiece "Six Characters in Search of an Author" (1921), in which a group of characters bursts into a rehearsal and share their story with the actors.

The inventor of the "play within a play" only began writing for the stage in his 40s.

Drawing inspiration from his wife's mental illness, he pondered the meaning of objective truth in philosophical works that blurred the lines between reality and performance.

- George Bernard Shaw (1925) -

The Irish-born playwright, intellectual and socialist activist is one of the few people to have won both an Oscar and a Nobel.

He baulked at accepting the Nobel, declaring "I can forgive (Alfred) Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize," but later relented.

He struggled to get published for many years before starting to write for the stage.

His most famous play is "Pygmalion", which was turned into the wildly successful Broadway musical and film "My Fair Lady" for which Shaw won the Oscar for best screenplay.

cb/acc/ach

© Agence France-Presse