Sideline Cut: It is not an easy thing to admit this, amidst the teak-tough sports heroes that usually adorn these pages, but I am scared.

France does that to me. I have tried to understand that country, as God is my witness, I have tried. When I was about eight, I had the opportunity to visit the place - in the company of adults of course. There were probably many pleasant moments, but every aspect of that trip has been superseded by a brief and terrifying encounter with a mademoiselle who took it upon herself to greet me in the native fashion. She was a mature lady of indeterminable scale - certainly, she was way more impressive than the Eiffel Tower - and visited herself upon the assembled party with ferocious friendliness. Being a polite sort of youngster, I proffered a meek hand to be shook and waited my turn. Decades later, the memory of her descent and subsequent appropriation of my entire being still causes me to break out in a cold, daylight sweat. She wore some sort of floral-printed dress that affected to swoop all around me. It was like having Duffy's famous Big Top collapse on top of you. The sunlight vanished and the scent of a million perfumes overcame me. For several minutes I struggled violently if uselessly in the firm belief that I was actually drowning, and when I finally was permitted to come up for air I had become the benefactor of several well-placed and indescribably moist smooches. I was numb with shock, but the relatives seemed to think it was a hoot.

For years after that, I had no truck with the place. In school, we began studying French through an illustrated book depicting life in an average Gallic town. That confirmed how weird and debauched the place was. One of the stars of the book was this postman, Monsieur Martin. A more sinister bastard you will not encounter anywhere in literature. He cycled around the well-appointed little village with an oily grin, greeting people in beginner's French and leaning way too close, in my opinion, to the absent Monsieur Gauloise's madame when pausing at the gate for a chat. But you shuddered to think of what he got up to once liberated from the printed page.

But I loved the way the language they spoke sounded, even if understanding it was beyond me, and I readily accepted the many assurances that France was the most cultured and beautiful country in the world. Certainly, watching its teams play sport on television offered a convincing proof. Back when Ireland didn't trouble itself with contests such as the soccer World Cup, I invariably found myself rooting for the French. When Harald Schumacher hacked down Patrick Batiston in 1982, I wished nothing more for the mop-headed German than a chance encounter with Monsieur Martin down a lonely, unlit alleyway. The French had this way about them that just drew you in, and so it remained across the spectrum of sport as the years passed.

Bernard Hinault, Yannick Noah or even Eric Cantona, they all had something that made you enjoy them.

But nothing appealed as much as the French rugby players. The influence that Jean Pierre Rives in his prime had on Irish youngsters of that period is a small, significant event that has never been remarked upon, but he captured the imagination in a way that the Irish heroes who toiled against him never could. France were a perfect mixture of the urbane and utterly savage.

The esteem in which I held Serge Blanco was heightened when I learned that when he wasn't running patterns around the distraught English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish defenders, he was happily puffing on 20 smokes a day. It made perfect sense that someone who appeared so utterly self-possessed would spend his non-sporting life doing the things the French did in Truffaut movies - arguing over nothing in galleries, making philosophical grimaces, beginning and ending romances and smoking, smoking, smoking.

I both liked and hated the way the band kept playing throughout the matches at Parc de Princes, and the whole business of releasing the cockerel had echoes of the Satanic about it. I never saw the French play live but that didn't matter; listening to Nigel Starmer-Smith on BBC was an integral part of the French rugby experience. Nobody could ever pronounce the name Patrice Lagisquet quite like the Englishman.

In more recent years, it became desperately important to me that Ireland should conspire to beat France in the Five (and then Six) Nations, for no other reason than it seemed so completely unlikely.

I don't know if the story about Samuel Beckett having a photograph of Ollie Campbell on his Parisian mantelpiece is true but I liked to think so. It was as if the writer was keeping vigil in the heart of France.

If so, it was a thankless job. The lowest point in all the near wins and heart-breaking defeats was when Emile N'tmack ran in a series of tries for a 25-7 win at Lansdowne Road in the mid-90s. For a good 60 minutes a shock seemed vaguely possible, and then the full back just killed us in that strong and elegant and half-interested way of his.

When Brian O'Driscoll inspired the breakthrough three years ago, it was wonderful but it kind of caught me unawares. Two years ago, I was in a bar in Queens at 9.0 a.m. for O'Driscoll's touchline-try, too disorientated and faraway to fully appreciate it.

So today is the first time I have the chance to see the French in the flesh, and though the prospect is thrilling, I am scared.

I will stand close to the rugby critics of this island and will recoil in terror if confronted by the French press. They will all look like Daniel Auteil and will cast a critical eye over the IRFU pre-match banquet in the vain hope of finding a tray of foix gras lurking among the Kimberly biscuits. Sniffing, they will settle for our inadequate vin rouge and, puffing on Gitanes, they will speak in mesmerising torrents that will make me dizzy. At least, this is how I assume they will behave.

I have tried my best. I have been pictured standing in front of Notre Dame cathedral. I have rented Jean de Florette and got lost searching for Wilde's tomb. I even know the words to some Charles Aznavour tunes.

But nothing works. The French are great but way too foxy for old bones. They terrify me. I know in my heart we are now talented and confident enough to enjoy a happy afternoon playing rugby against them, but superstition gets the better of me still.

I wish Fabien Galthie was out there and that Blanco was still around and hope Castaignede features at some stage. And mainly, I just hope I can bear to watch.