It's one thing playing a Test in an empty stadium or even with a packed Aviva, but it's a different dynamic altogether at a 75,000 Saturday night capacity Stade de France in full cauldron mode supporting a suitably fired-up home side. A chunk of this Irish side had never experienced anything quite like it and even for those who'd been through it before, well, it had been a while.
Ireland's attacking game has been overhauled and made huge progress over the preceding nine games, but with the additional pressure imposed by the line speed and physicality of the French defence, there was something of a step back in time. Old habits die hard. In the first half especially, Ireland occasionally reverted to one-off runners and often lost the collisions as a result.
"I thought a little bit at times we reverted a little bit back to type, of 18 months ago, or you can go back a little bit further," admitted Andy Farrell yesterday, a revealing comment even when choosing his words carefully.
“Sometimes that comes from a little bit of pressure from the opposition. Of course we’ve got to be better than that because there were opportunities out there for us to be in sync and be ourselves and play to the space, and we didn’t see that sometimes because of a little bit of inaccuracies.”
Sought collisions
Farrell clearly felt that his players resorted to seeking out collisions, akin to going toe to toe with the bigger man in the middle of the ring rather than boxing a little smarter.
“It’s a trap,” said Farrell of the narrative around Ireland losing the physical battle in Paris. “I’ve seen Irish teams in the past fall into this trap of ‘they lost the physical battle’ and the next game, the sleeves are rolled up and the performance is worse because there is a reason why teams are physical or not. There were elements of that game where we were unbelievably physical.”
More relevant, he added, was “know-how” and “accuracy”.
“There is a lot of fuel that has to go into being able to be physical and one of the main aspects of that is being connected, working well with one another and making sure we’re not doing things on our own. The minute it becomes going off on a tangent, ‘I’ll do it, I’ll roll my sleeves up’ then the opposition are allowed to dominate you.
“There’s a bit of learning in or around that space of the game for us because it was more of an understanding about how physicality works; you have to earn the right to be physical and that’s something we have to learn.”
In truth, Ireland will never be blessed with the same conveyor belt of huge, physical athletes within the French player pool.
“If we’ve all got 135kg blokes, just wind them up and let them go, but we’ve not got that so we’ve got to be a little bit smarter.”
Ireland don't have the strength in depth of France either, and whereas Fabien Galthié changed his frontrow en bloc in the 55th minute, both Andrew Porter and Tadhg Furlong put in huge 72-minute shifts. But Farrell played down the apparent dependability on the first-choice props.
“No, it’s not a concern. It’s a feel from my point of view, they were trucking along unbelievably well. In fact, if you watch their individual games, they were astonishing actually. They were in the flow of things and the minute we see a dip, we make the change.”
‘Missed opportunities’
Farrell said he could have been talking all day about the issues raised by their review. Aside from two scrum penalties, others were the lineout and particularly the breakdown, where three of the many turnovers led to two Melvyn Jaminet three-pointers and Cyril Baille’s key try.
“There certainly was a lack of urgency, a lack of winning the race to the breakdown, and sometimes inaccuracies in what we were looking for and how we executed that,” admitted Farrell. “Sometimes there was an element of there being somebody there to target and take them out of the game and we missed those opportunities.
“It’s something that we never thought was going to come into our game because we do breakdown every day and it’s something that we’ve improved a lot. But the review of that will keep us sharp.”
After the two-day review and training camp for a squad of 23, the 14 players released to play for the provinces over the weekend will be restored to the enlarged squad, and possibly one or two more, in advance of next Sunday’s round-three game against Italy at the Aviva Stadium.
Dan Sheehan looks set to make his first Test start after Ronan Kelleher's shoulder injury ruled him out of the remainder of the tournament. Farrell also confirmed that captain Johnny Sexton will be fully fit for training next week. The Italian game offers scope to rotate a little, but this runs the risk of some players not playing for three weeks prior to the round-four game in Twickenham or, in Sexton's case, four weeks.
“There’s all sorts of things you need to bring into contention. It’s game time, it’s opportunity, it’s trying to predict what our team will look like in two or three weeks’ time, etc. There are all sorts of different permutations and it’s a tricky one around the fallow weeks because game time is pretty important.
“Some guys have not played too much, some of them have been sent back [to their provinces] but there are other guys who haven’t played too much. Do they need a game? What’s it going to look like if they don’t? There’s many moving parts we need to assess over the coming days.”
