For the last two seasons, the winner of this fixture has gone on to win the grand slam, too. Given the way Ireland went about their work in this 38-17 victory in Marseille, you guess they’re going to take an awful lot of stopping again this year, more of it, perhaps, than any of the other four teams in the championship can offer.
Three months on from the World Cup, the game was pitched as a little glimpse of the final that might have been. In fact, only the Irish were in anything like the same sort of form they had been in that tournament. Really, the game was a first look at these two teams’ answers to the question they’ve both had hanging over them ever since those last moments of the knock-out rounds – what now? France clearly have not come up with an answer, yet. They were all over the place, their performance was strewn with handling errors and missed tackles.
