France 30 Ireland 24

A narrow loss on the scoreboard doesn't tell the full story

Ireland were brave, landed shots and couldn't be faulted for effort but they were outmatched physically by a bruising French pack who knew where and how to beat us. In doing so, they illustrated to the rest of the elite sides in the game where Ireland can be got at. It's up to Ireland to respond.

Match Quality

Match Intensity

Match Importance

Quality of Opposition

5

This game was something of a wake-up call.

Since March of 2020, Ireland played seven games at home in a row and won all seven. The closest of those games on the scoreboard was against Japan back in June, believe it or not, but all of these games had one thing in common – Irish physical dominance. When you have physical dominance, things are so much easier. It’s nearly hard to adequately describe the freedom that collision dominance and quick ball give your attack. Forwards blasting over the gainline and blowing the opposition off the ball at the ruck is the fundamental gold standard of this game.

Over the last year, more or less, we’ve seen that when we have that – and we had it a lot – we can tear teams up, even The Mighty All Blacks™. Last week’s win over Wales was the best example you’ll see of that principle but France were always going to be a different story. They are big, they are powerful and they make you respect the physics of the game.

Sometimes I think the narrative around the game tries to defy the physics of the game as they are in reality. Yes, it would be nice if elite power and size wasn’t the deciding factor in most games at the very top end of this game but that isn’t the world we live in. Power matters. Weight matters. Those two things on their own are nothing but when you put them in a well-coached, well-drilled and motivated unit with talent and brains dotted throughout the side in key points, you will win more rugby games than you lose.

The main question coming into this game would be how France would use their size and power differential. We know that France kick longer than any team in the tournament so we also knew that they would look to give us the possession we have maximised this season – that 22-50 zone – and hammer us at the breakdown until we make an error, they win a penalty or we’re forced to kick the ball back to them. Their try was a combination of all three.

Ireland’s second try came from more or less the exact same principle of long restart and a poach on France’s setup ruck after the take.

I genuinely think that the dreaded kick (boo! hiss!), either the box or long drive downfield variety is something we might have used a little more given some of the success we had at their breakdown, but France rarely give you that opportunity. Normally they have kicked long before you have an opportunity to stress their breakdown in an area that can truly hurt them.

As we’ve been over at length last week, Ireland pass more than any other team in the tournament – France pass the least of any side other than Italy, as an interesting counter-point – and that level of passing has to be supported by an efficient breakdown. When people talk about “earning the right to go wide” it can sound like parents explaining to their children that they can’t stop in McDonald’s on the way home from a day out at the zoo. Earning the right to go wide can mean a lot of things but in this instance, it’s about setting a fast-moving offside line that prevents the opposition from defending you on their terms. Against France, just passing the ball without committing France to a fast-moving offside line is an invitation to get smashed up in contact or make a tonne of handling errors.

So Ireland needed impact at the offensive breakdown and to do that, they would need to be able to win collisions in the first place and then strike heavy bodies off the ball to create a quick platform for Gibson-Park to stress the fringes, which begins the process that Ireland use to manipulate the opposition defence.

Against Wales, we had 72% of our rucks end under three seconds. Against France, we had 42%. When you don’t have that quick ruck ball in Ireland’s attacking system, you either kick or your pass accuracy has to be top-notch off #9. The kicking was mostly OK but the passing was a problem for much of the game.

You can see bits and pieces of Gibson-Park’s passing here. When you have quick ball and dominant collisions, pass quality is less important off #9 because you’re running into pockets of space against disorganised defences. When your collisions are sub-optimal and your ruck recycle is generally slower, you need your passing to be accurate so you can get the best chance at getting quick ball on the next ruck.

Gibson-Park was very inconsistent in this regard and while he did score a nice try with a very well taken snipe – the exact thing he’s selected to do – his pass quality fluctuated quite a bit from ruck to ruck across the game. That isn’t to say that Ireland didn’t get any quick ball during the game, however. When we did, I thought we generally did OK with it. Furlong’s passing work after forcing compressions was of its usual elite standards even if that quality wasn’t always duplicated by his teammates.

That battle between French brutality at the defensive breakdown and Ireland’s quick-ball reliant deep passing game was where this game was won and lost. France found a lot of joy kicking the ball deep to Ireland and hurting our game exactly where they needed to hurt it to make it that bit more difficult.

Ireland managed to get that 22-50 zone game working every now and then in an environment without dominant collisions or as much quick ball as we’d have liked but some French cynicism and poor pass quality at key moments let us down when it counted.

In that environment, it’s actually a real positive that Ireland managed to pull this game back to within a point but France’s power always threatened to unbalance us. Their pressure at the breakdown and a constant willingness to kick Ireland into high-stress situations was very difficult to handle. No ruck was safe, not even an exit, and that was a big factor in Ireland’s forwards looking different and less effective than last week.

It’s harder to pass, harder to run good blocker lines, harder to win collisions… harder to do everything. That’s what France’s power does. Ireland are a high possession team and France made possession painful, bar a few brief moments of daylight where Ireland managed to break free of the shackles.

There’s no shame in losing a tight game like this but I’m not sure what lessons there are to take from it. We will be better the next time we play France? I mean, probably, but the physics of the game will be the exact same then. They aren’t getting any smaller or weaker and Galthie’s unique form of kick pressure and deep reserves in the tight five mean that they don’t really “tire out” in any meaningful way.

In fact, it was our power players – Furlong and Porter – getting banged up with 68 minutes on the clock by French replacements.

Until Ireland have the 80 minute power to trade like for like against France, we’ll be looking for fluke tries off restarts and last ditch try saving tackles to keep us in touch. It is not a reliable strategy to do what we did here, just better. People say that we should have won this game but after watching it back, I think we were blessed to be within the winnable range we were.

I felt on the first watch that we had to go down the line when we won a penalty on 72 minutes but go back six minutes and you’ll see a very tired looking Irish lineout blowing a close range opportunity.

With Porter and Furlong already red-lining after 72 minutes in this environment and real concerns over our ability to either drive over France directly or endure a long close range sequence, I think taking the three points was the right idea in context as opposed to what might well have been a phyrric adventure on the 5m line.

Until we have the tight power to match up with France for 80 minutes – in the front five most of all – we will either kick more, which we did after that 72nd minute penalty to fairly good effect until an error on a spilled ball allowed France to surge late in the game, or we will almost always come out on the losing side of these fixtures with a slightly different flavour of moral victory. All depending on the range of the scoreline, of course, which will either be relatively tight or emphatic, but it will almost always be a loss.

In the movie, Don’t Look Up, the opening few scenes of the movie show Leonardo Di Caprio’s character Dr. Mindy using maths – orbital dynamics – to determine with 99.7% certainty that a comet will hit Earth.

“Why does the ephemeris keep getting lower?” asks Jennifer Lawrence’s character Kate Dibiasky as Mindy keeps writing smaller and smaller numbers as he resolves the mathematics out. The maths show that the orbit of the comet is on a direct course with the Earth, that’s why.

After Mindy works out that the comet is almost certain to hit Earth, you can see Dr. Mindy rubbing out the last few bits of his work that show the mathematical certainty for what it is to hide it from the college students and PHD candidates that are in the room. He doesn’t want to alarm them because he’s deeply alarmed himself.

The physics of rugby are broadly similar but the margins of certainty a little wider. Pretending that Johnny Sexton would have won that game for Ireland is the equivalent of rubbing out those last few zeros on the board. It’s comforting, for a few seconds, but the reality is what it is.

Until we can bring the power and size we need into the Irish pack and pack replacements, we will continue to lose this fixture at home and away, as we will to every other side who can lever the same kind of elite size and power against us consistently. Right now, that’s France and South Africa. Maybe England and maybe Australia in a year or so.

If we want to win Grand Slams – and we do – we will always have to go through this French side.

If we want to win a World Cup – and we do – we will have to go through South Africa and France, probably.

We are three replacement power forward props and two power forward back five players (one of them has to be a heavy-grade second row) away from competing with France on a like for like basis. That, for me, is the reality. So yes, elements of this game were encouraging but if we want to match the rising French giant, we will need more big beasts of our own if we don’t want to be perennially encouraged and actually want to win big games against them when it really counts.

And if we can’t do that?

Don’t Look Up.

Notable Players

There was a lot of talk about Joey Carbery in the build-up to this game – and afterwards – but that comes with the territory for that green #10 jersey. I know it’s the same in every country. All you have to do is look at the Marcus Smith hype festival in England at the moment to know that but it seems to be particularly hectic in Ireland. It’s kill or be killed and you keep what you kill. O’Gara took out Humphries, Sexton eventually took out O’Gara and since then Sexton’s primacy has been unchallenged. There is a comfort to that, especially with a generational talent like Sexton. Carbery has been the anointed challenger for a few years now but injury has reduced his ability to really challenge Sexton for that jersey.

When Sexton pulled out before the game, Carbery finally got his opportunity to start a big Six Nations game and he did pretty well, actually, in the context of the environment he was playing in. When you have slow ball, less than parity in the collisions and erratic service from #9, you’re not in the optimal environment to perform. People talk about “tempo” from #9 but when the ball is slow coming back from the forwards, “tempo” can often mean looking busy when what’s actually required is the kind of passing that can add a fraction of a second to the next phase. In that context, I think Carbery did well. His kicking off the tee was superb, his running of the game was measured and while he took 20 minutes to really grow into the game he more than held up his end of the bargain in what was the biggest game of his career to date.

He was a hair away from a four-star performance after a third watch back but I really liked what I saw from him here.

Andrew Porter and Tadhg Furlong were the standout Irish players for me. Sheehan did well off the bench but Ireland being as close as we were to France is mostly down to the power of our starting props, in my opinion, who did 72 minutes against the biggest physical challenge in this hemisphere. I ended up dropping Porter down to a three-star rating because of his issues in the scrum but his work around the field was really top class. He is a world-class front five forward who will have a target on his back at the scrum for the rest of the season in a way that Furlong does not but if he can pull that back around, he’ll start every game of consequence for Ireland for the next few years.

Furlong had one or two iffy moments at the set-piece too – both of them – but the quality of his offensive involvements pushed him into four-star range for me. One of the key players for Ireland and as irreplaceable right now as Hayes or O’Connell ever were, if not more so. Imagine how irreplaceable O’Gara was in the mid-2000s for Munster and Ireland. That’s how irreplaceable Tadhg Furlong is right now, far more so than Sexton or anyone else. If Ireland is to win a Six Nations this year, or a series in New Zealand, or a Slam next season, or a World Cup in 2023 it’ll be based on the broad shoulders of Tadhg Furlong.

The Wally Ratings: France (A)

The Wally Ratings explainer page is here.  

Players are rated based on their time on the pitch, if they were playing notably out of position, and on the overall curve of the team performance. DNP means the player did not feature and N/A means they weren’t on the pitch long enough to warrant a fair rating.