Ireland head coach Scott Bemand drew real encouragement from their strong performance against France in the Six Nations opener but could not conceal his disappointment about the 27-15 defeat.
The scoreline at Kingspan Stadium was a tad misleading, Bemand accepting that this was one that got away.
“Absolutely, absolutely,” agreed Bemand after Ireland’s eighth straight loss to Les Bleus. However, Saturday’s result was a measure of how much more competitive Ireland were compared to the preceding seven losses which had an average scoreline of 35-9.
“We were just talking at the end there and the narrative with the group is that we don’t want to be noble losers. We don’t want to put up a good fist of it against a good France team. With 10 minutes to go we felt we could go on and win.
“They’re a young group still, they’ve got to be in those positions. We’ve had some experience, like at the end of the New Zealand game in WXV1 when we were able to come back and win it, but coming out here against these Tier One Nations and World Cup contenders, we thought it would come down to those last 20 minutes.
“And you’re going to need to have that composure, not belief really, just calmness of thought that you can execute where you want to be on the pitch, how you get there and then you take those opportunities.
“So, it does feel like we’ve lost a game we could have been in, and I think them scoring at the end takes the scoreboard away a little bit,” said Bemand in relation to Emilie Boulard’s 74th-minute try which denied Ireland a losing bonus point.
“We can rue losing bonus points or what have you, but as a group we’re more disappointed that we weren’t fighting in their 22 to win the game.”
France initially pulled to a 14-0 inside the opening 20 minutes but Ireland fought back to move within two points after Aoife Wafer’s second try in the 67th minute, the normally reliable Dannah O’Brien missing the conversion that would have levelled proceedings.
“France are great,” said Bemand. “They had a tough WXV1 and a few months away training, and we knew they would come here full of confidence. Before the Six Nations starts, nobody has dropped a ball. We knew they would try and start fast.
“We were also trying to play with tempo and we caught them napping a couple of times. And a couple of areas we were a little unlucky. A couple of times we were able to get our game on the front foot, but against a big physical pack, how we can impact them with our game, speed of thought, speed of mind, but staying composed. That just moved away from us a little bit today.
“But we are building resilience. We’ve got a resilient group.. It would be nice to get a few of those points a little earlier, and then had the composure and experience to see it home when we had the opportunity at around 70 minutes,” Bemand added.
Edel McMahon, part of an impactful bench on her return to the team, echoed the head coach, admitting there were “mixed emotions” after the loss.
“When the whistle went, we were all disappointed. It was a game where we were in, we knew we could compete in and actually win, and that’s really satisfying to see that’s where we’re at as a squad.
“We’re not complacent to think, ‘Ah that looks all right, oh we competed’, we’re actually there to win games. There’s a frustration with that.
“But on the flip side, I’m extremely proud of the girls because we set out in this campaign to be hard to beat, to fire shots and compete with Tier One Nations, and we did that today.”
