When, not if, Fiji beat France in Lyon on Saturday, Dave Ellis says he’ll break a 10-month abstinence from alcohol and pour himself a glass of vintage red wine.

For someone who spent 11 years as Les Bleus’ defence coach and is now in charge of Fiji’s rearguard, Saturday’s clash is another full circle moment in the remarkable career of the 69-year-old former miner from a rugby league background.

Having played league in England, Australia and France, Ellis was introduced to the 15-man code by Jacques Fouroux and hasn’t looked back since the French rugby legend got him involved with Racing.

Since those early days in Paris, Ellis has worked at the top end of the club game on both sides of the English channel, with Gloucester and London Irish in the Prem, and Bordeaux, Castres, Brive and Lyon in French club rugby.

In Test rugby, his CV includes spells with Tonga and Romania, where he worked under Andy Robinson, and he was also part of the All Blacks‘ coaching team that beat the Lions in 2005.

But it was his time with France, between 2000 and 2011, that Ellis is best-known for. Working for Bernard Laporte and then Marc Lievremont, Les Bleus won multiple Six Nations honours and fell just short, by the narrowest of margins, of becoming world champions in his final year.

In a chaotic 2011 World Cup, which included a shock defeat to Tonga and a mutiny against Lievremont’s leadership, Ellis’ calm assuredness somehow managed to get the players to keep it together enough for them to reach the final and push the All Blacks all the way, losing 8-7.

Perhaps the highlight of Ellis’ time, though, was the defensive masterclass in the RWC 2007 quarter-final that booby trapped the All Blacks and sent them packing for home prematurely, despite losing tackle machine, Serge Betsen, who Ellis named his labrador after, four minutes into the match.

No.8 Thierry Dusatoir took it upon himself to do twice the workload in Betsen’s absence and made a then world record 38 tackles in his back-row colleague’s absence.

“There are a lot of games that stand out, the Grand Slam in 2004, and the two Championships in 2006 and 2007, but the World Cup quarter-final that same year against New Zealand was special,” Ellis once recalled to this writer.

“We’d employed one tactic in the first half which didn’t really work so in the second we changed it and started double tackling everyone. The aim was to force New Zealand to throw more people into the breakdown.

“It upset their attacking game and we managed to knock them out.”

It will take another Herculean effort for Fiji to dull the attacking instincts of a French team that has made more clean breaks than any other this tournament.

But now that he has worked with Fiji’s Top-14 based players, Ellis believes he could be uncorking one of the Lyon region’s finest bottles of Côte-Rôtie after the final whistle at the Groupama Stadium.

“I stopped drinking wine on the 2nd of January, for no other reason than the fact I went for a health check and my cholesterol was high. So, I went on a diet and I’ve lost 20 kilos in weight,” he told RugbyPass.

“But when we beat France on Saturday, I’ll probably open a bottle of wine to celebrate.

“It is quite ironic that it’s in a city where I worked for five-and-a-half years, helping Lyon get out of Pro D2 into the Top 14.”

Ellis intially came on board with the Fiji RU to develop local coaches on the islands. But he found himself back at the sharp-end of international rugby as a member of the coaching team during the Pacific Nations Cup, and has stayed on as part of new head coach Jake White’s staff for the resumption of the Nations Championship.

With games against France, Ireland and Italy ahead, he can afford himself a wry smile when he thinks back to only a few years ago when he was helping out regional side Kenilworth RFC, while also working on a project in south Leeds, in Jason Robinson territory, to turn Hunslet RLFC into a dual code operation.

Like another wily cross-code coach of pensionable age, Clive Griffiths, Ellis refuses to be defined by his advancing years.

“As soon as I got the job, I texted him (Griffiths) and sent him a photo of all the bits of press in Fiji and the quote in Wayne Bennett’s book, ‘don’t die with the music in you’.”

In his short time working with Fiji, Ellis has already seen a vast improvement from the Pacific Nations Cup in September, when a group of largely local and Fijian Drua players lost their crown to Japan, to the standalone Test against the Brave Blossoms, which marked Jake White’s first Test in charge of the team.

“When you come into Lyon and you get all the players who play on a regular basis for the teams in the Top 14 or the UK, you can see the difference, physically and in the conversations you have with the players, then you think, ‘woah, it’s a different story now’.

“We’ve put in a lot of work in on the organisational side of things and on the players’ tackle height, I think we are up to 92% of tackles under the sternum, targeting the ball, and on discipline.

“Against Japan the other week, we were only penalised three times in the whole match, and that is the standard we aspire to.”

Fiji’s only win in 12 previous meetings with France was at the Stade de France in 2018. Semi Radradra and Josua Tuisova were the try scorers that night, and Ben Volavola kicked 11 points in the 21-14 win. Tuisova and Volavola are in the current squad, and no doubt Ellis will be raising his glass to them, and their teammates, if they manage a repeat.