Anger followed dismay in France yesterday as team managers were blamed for lacklustre play that let England rob the French of a rugby World Cup that was supposed to boost morale and the national renaissance led by President Sarkozy.

A pall of mourning descended on Paris, as well as Toulouse and the other big rugby towns of the southwest, after the demise of French hopes of winning the cup that the country is hosting for the first time.

“The English destroy the dream of an entire nation,” moaned the headline in le Parisien newspaper as hundreds of shirted fans were still staggering around the streets of the Left Bank 12 hours after the semi-final victory.

England supporters poured all day into the Gare du Nord Eurostar station for the trip home, many of them vowing to return for next weekend’s final with or without tickets. They had been celebrating largely by themselves after about 50,000 Parisians drifted quietly away from the Champ de Mars, the field by the Eiffel tower where the match was broadcast on a big screen.

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Disbelief gave way to a bout of Gallic soul-searching as France pondered on yet another defeat of French flair by the stolid, supposedly unimaginative English. “It’s so often the same; we underestimate the rosbifs and they whack us just when we thought we’ve won,” said Christophe Medecin, a Paris stockbroker.

While the media was full of grudging admiration for the magic boot of Jonny Wilkinson, knives were out for the manager who sent the losing team into the field. All wondered why Bernard Laporte, who was proclaimed a genius only last week after France’s surprise defeat of New Zealand, had ordered his side to deploy “English” tactics of kicking and blocking rather than running for tries. Le Parisiengave him two out of ten, saying that no one could work out why he had adopted a “simplistic” strategy for combating England. Bernard Lapasset, the president of the French Rugby Association, said: “I don’t understand the way we played. When you play against the English you don’t play like the English. You play à la française and pass the ball.”

L’Equipe, the authoritative sports daily, voiced disgust, saying that France could not beat the English at their own style. “The big lesson of yesterday’s match is this: the English won because they never gave up being English. So English.” It added: “The only thing that is beautiful is victory, especially when it is achieved against our strange neighbours.”

Mr Sarkozy, who was in the stadium with half a dozen Cabinet ministers, comforted Mr Laporte with a pat on the shoulder as Sebastien “Caveman” Chabal and other French players knelt on the Stade de France turf, some in tears. Mr Laporte is to become Mr Sarkozy’s Sports Minister next week, but his future is thought to be uncertain after he failed to deliver the victory that Mr Sarkozy hoped would lift spirits and his drive to relaunch France. Mr Laporte said: “We wanted to be world champions and we will not be. It’s a pity because the team had desire, heart and soul. We lacked a bit of juice compared with the previous match [with New Zealand].”

The TF1 lunchtime news put it more lyrically: “One of the most beautiful generations of rugby players that France has produced will never be champions of the world.”

Players also queued up with self-criticism. Frédéric Michalak, the fly-half who came on in the second half, said that his team “failed to deliver on D-Day” because they had lost the appetite for battle. “We didn’t really want to be champions today.”

As the experts mulled over a match that many had privately seen as a formality, a despairing fan voiced the prevailing patriotic anger on television. “These English are going to mess us around until the end of our days,” the woman told the TF1 network. TF1 drew a record 20 million viewers in the closing minutes of the match.