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France qualified for the World Cup in large part because of an uncalled hand ball by Thierry Henry last November.

So it was a bit
rich to see Henry, the aging French striker, imploring the referee to
call a hand ball against an opponent with the minutes ticking down on
France’s opening game, against Uruguay.

But there would be
no blown whistle this time either after Henry’s short-range shot
ricocheted off Mauricio Victorino’s right arm – held tightly by
Victorino’s side – in front of the Uruguay goal. There would be no
penalty kick for France and no goals at all in a 0-0 tie that was
hardly a bore but not nearly a match for the end-to-end spectacle of
the day’s other game in Group A between South Africa and Mexico.

The commonality was
the soundtrack: with the South African horns, the vuvuzelas, providing
a constant drone inside Cape Town’s new seaside stadium at Green Point.

“It’s frustrating
not to win,” France coach Raymond Domenech said. “We were not quite
precise and serene enough with our finishing, and they defended well.”

But even without
goals – and both the Frenchman Sidney Govou and the Uruguayan star
Diego Forlan had fine chances – there was still plenty of news. It has
been an extended, unsettled phase for the French team, which reached
the final in the 2006 World Cup in Germany but has struggled to
reproduce that sort of form in the four-year interim.

On Friday, Domenech
juggled his lineup, leaving midfielder Florent Malouda on the bench and
abandoning the attack-minded 4-3-3 formation that he had used in
preparatory matches. Instead, Domenech reverted to a 4-2-3-1 formation,
with Nicolas Anelka the lone striker and Jeremy Toulalan and the
surprise pick Abou Diaby playing defensive midfield positions in front
of France’s back four.

Diaby, a tall and
physical presence who can also dribble through traffic, looked very
much like he belonged, particularly in the first half, even though he
had not started a match for France since 2007.

What added intrigue
to the lineup shift was a report in the French news media that Domenech
and Malouda had clashed in a training session Thursday because Malouda
had been too aggressive during drills, putting his teammates at risk.
Domenech and Malouda, who came on as a substitute in the 75th minute,
denied those reports.

“Sometimes,
depending on the opponent, I make choices rather than others,” Domenech
said. “No player is sure to play the whole World Cup until the end.
It’s tiring, draining and you have to rotate. I started tonight.”

Domenech has
gradually become an unpopular figure in France and will be replaced
after the tournament by Laurent Blanc, one of the stars of the 1998
team that won the Cup in France.

Part, if only part,
of Domenech’s image problem has been results. France failed to advance
out of the first round at the 2008 European Championships. And in order
to qualify here, it needed that hand ball from Henry that led directly
to its late and decisive goal against Ireland.

The Irish have not
forgotten. Domenech fielded a question from an Irish reporter Thursday
about whether the French deserved to be here (the answer was “oui”).

And among those in
the capacity crowd of 64,100 on Friday were Kevin Daly and a group of
young Irishmen dressed in green and carrying a large poster that read
“Team 33”: a reference to early suggestions from soccer officials that
Ireland just might get to be the 33d team in the World Cup after the
injustice of its elimination.

That never materialised.

“We bought our
tickets a year and a half ago, and obviously we hoped that Ireland
would be here, but when we ended up with France tickets, we thought
obviously that it was a great chance to protest,” said Daly, a
26-year-old from Ennis who works for a public relations firm in Dublin.

Henry’s career has
hardly flourished recently. He played sparingly late in the season for
his talent-packed Spanish club team, Barcelona, which explains in part
why, at 32, he is no longer in his national team’s starting lineup.
Instead, he is considering a late-career move to the Red Bulls of Major
League Soccer.

But Henry remains
an icon in France, and he is the first French player to compete in four
World Cups. On Friday, he received a loud ovation from the South
African and French fans when he loped into the game in the 72nd minute
as a replacement for Anelka. Nine minutes later, France had a man
advantage after Uruguay’s Nicolas Lodeiro was sent off after receiving
a second yellow card from the Japanese referee Yuichi Nishimura. But
though Henry and France applied plenty of pressure after Lodeiro was
sent off in the 81st minute, down the stretch, there would be no goal
and no hand ball either. An Irish reporter asked the French players
afterward if that might not have been a form of justice.

“Why are you
talking about this again?” asked the French captain Patrice Evra. “It’s
finished now. I think that’s the past, the past. We are here.”

So are the other three teams in Group A. For now, they all have one point.

© 2010 New York Times News Service