Andy Farrell does not do long hangovers. They seem to be on what is, you guess, a pretty long list of things he considers a waste of time. He seemed genuinely perplexed whenever anyone asked him thislast week if his team was suffering from a comedown after the World Cup.
“In all honesty the World Cup has nothing to do with it,” Farrell said again late on Friday night. “All the talk about hangovers, there’s no hangovers with us. Hangovers are for tomorrow. We’re three months down the line. It’s a big hangover if you can’t get over it in that time.”
Go ask Fabien Galthié about that or maybe give him a minute to swallow another paracetamol. At 9pm local time on Friday there was not a whole lot between France and Ireland, they were twin favourites for the championship. If anything France were slightly ahead given that they had home advantage for this fixture and that whoever won it went on to win the grand slam in 2022 and 2023.
They spent the past four years chasing each other up the world rankings all the way to the knockout rounds of the World Cup, where they were beaten by the two finalists. South Africa pipped France by a point, New Zealand beat Ireland by four.
Ninety minutes later, the gulf between them seemed as wide as the Mediterranean. A 38-17 victory will do that. In the French papers, it was not just a loss but, as Sud Ouest put it, a “humiliation”, and a sign that “something has broken” in Galthié’s team.
It was their biggest defeat since he took over and the first time they have lost two matches back-to-back under his leadership. Galthié won a payout from a French tabloid this past week after they published photographs of him frolicking naked on a beach with his girlfriend, the Belgian actress Helena Noguerra. After this result, he can count that as the second-most embarrassing thing he has been put through lately.
Galthié blamed the performance on Paul Willemse, who was shown a red card in the 31st minute, but even he had to admit there were bigger problems here. “Our offence wasn’t there, clearly, we wasted chances, conceded turnovers, dropped balls, suffered from a lack of speed.”
France play Scotland away next, which was already shaping up to be their hardest game of the championship. Galthié only recently signed a new contract, but has rubbed a lot of people up the wrong way over the years and it will not take too many more bad results for public opinion to turn against him. It is not really clear what Farrell would have to do to make the Ireland players and public give up on him. At this point, he could likely cavort up and down O’Connell Street in the nude and pass it off as a masterclass in tactics and man‑management.
Ireland turned in one of their very finest performances in Marseille, five tries and a record victory. Farrell and his players shared an air of quiet contentment, an obvious satisfaction at a job well done, but no one was getting carried away. Some of them were even worrying over what they might have done better.
“It was right up there,” said Dan Sheehan. “It’s special to be able to win against France in France because it’s a hostile environment where the crowd get right behind their team. We did well to control the majority of the game, but there’s a few things we can fix up.”
“It felt good at times, certainly the first 30 minutes felt really, really good,” said Ireland’s captain, Peter O’Mahony. “We felt like we were all over them defensively, like our attack was rolling, and our lineout was going well, but at the same time there were areas there, like in that last 10 minutes before half-time when we backed up a couple of penalties, where we put ourselves under pressure. So we’ve plenty to work on.”
Which feels ominous for everyone else. Sheehan and O’Mahony picked at Ireland’s discipline, which they felt had got away from them once or twice too often. “We were giving away too many penalties around halfway, which allowed them to kick into our corner, and we got stuck there a little while, in both halves,” said Sheehan. He ticked off a few other things he wanted them to improve on too.
“There’d be a few times we probably didn’t reset quick enough, a couple of times we could have scored a try one or two phases earlier, or maybe a couple when we made hard work out of getting out of our own half.” All of which speaks volumes about the attitude Farrell has instilled in this team.
“We’ve been talking all week about how this isn’t a new journey, it’s just a continuation of the one we’ve been on,” Sheehan said. “We’ve been excellent in 90% of what we had done previously, so now it’s just about kicking on again.”
