Simon Mannix does not give a shit about his French accent, and it works, for me at least!
I’m interested to hear how he comes across to a native French speaker @vero ?
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Oddly I could understand him quite well on first listen…but not the reporter…x 
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The English brain is perfectly attuned to English pronunciation of foreign words so interprets them easily, so it’s not at all odd Helen6 that you should understand him. In my own experience English speakers can speak almost as fluently with each other in French as in English, and have at such times access to a wider French vocabulary than when conversing with a francophone with no or limited English.
The same seems to apply when a conversation takes place between a French person speaking in English and an English person responding in French. I can’t explain it, perhaps someone else can share an opinion.
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I have friends with a holiday home nearby who have often said that they enjoy hearing my neighbour and I talking because they can understand the majority of what we say which is not normal. I think it is for two reasons; my neighbour chooses the vocabulary that she uses very carefully and treats me like a six year old while my replies are very much influenced by English syntax and pronunciation.
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I don’t think a French speaker who didn’t also speak English would find everything he says easy to understand!
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I’m sure you are right David, it seems to me that most French people I encounter, recognising my limitations, speak carefully and use simple terms to communicate with me, and I am indeed grateful for and humbled by that. I can’t properly fathom what they make of my efforts to speak in their own language, but there seems to a universal tendency amongst people to reward the efforts of strangers to use the local language, however garbled they may sound, and that is a very optimistic trait, I think.
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He was best man at my friend’s son, Tom Beim’s wedding at Cheltenham College chapel.
They both played for Gloucester.
I was there.
Tom now plays polo.
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Actually Simon Mannix is a kiwi and has the rather flat diction when he speaks english as well.
I am sure there are a lot of French people who couldn’t give a shit either. Who is Simon Mannix anyway?Never heard of him, but than again I don’t get out much either.
He is, or was a New Zealand rugby player.
Does anyone else when International Rugby Players were announced with their ‘proper’ jobs attached? I recall Doctors, Bankers, Lawyers, etc used to feature highly. When Rugby really was the ‘Hooligan’s Game played by Gentlemen’
It was also how they earned their living both during and after their international careers.
I know a little while ago I did one of those ‘where are they now’ checks, and it was quite depressing to see how far the more recent professional players had fallen in most cases, as they had nothing outside the game for a long time, and the money to be made even now doesn’t make up enough to live on for the greater part of their lives.