For this weekend at least, Dublin has a French quarter. By the time the final whistle went at the Aviva Stadium, the thousands of French fans inside, outside and all around the ground were cheering, screaming, roaring, singing, dancing, in celebration of one of the great victories.
They had travelled in huge numbers and been rewarded with five tries and 42 points, a record score for them in this city, revenge in plenty for the 21-point thrashing by Ireland in Marseille last year. France are favourites for the championship now and the Irish are squaring up to the kind of existential hangover you get by being so completely beaten in a match that had so much riding on it.
The game will take some unpicking. In the first moments after it was over, it left a mess of images. Somewhere in the tumult was young Sam Prendergast looking, for the first time, like a kid playing a man’s game, being smacked back in his very first collision with Yoram Moefana and stripped by Uini Atonio, and Damian Penaud galloping across the field, the game unspooling around him like a film that had slipped its reel, Louis Bielle-Biarrey sprinting around Hugo Keenan like he was a maypole, to slap the ball down behind the posts, and Jean-Baptiste Gros tossing an underhand pass to Maxime Lucu as he came barrelling in behind him, and Oscar Jégou twisting underneath Tadhg Beirne’s reach to twist over the Irish try line.
In this sort of form, playing France is like sitting out a whirlwind. All you can do is duck and cover. The cruel part is that when the Irish side sit down to go over the tapes, they might just find that there were the makings of a very different game somewhere in there, too.
There were moments when the match was right there for the taking, if they had only been able to reach out and seize hold of it. They will look at the first 20 minutes in particular when they had three-quarters of the territory and three-quarters of the possession, and did three quarters of naff-all with it. They had a run of four early penalties, sent two to the corner and tried to maul their way over, kicked a third at goal, and still didn’t manage so much as a single point.
Even then, they were right in it either side of half-time. They were two points down right before the break, and five points up right after it, after Dan Sheehan scored off a maul in the corner.
Better yet, at that point the French looked to be reeling from the loss of the talismanic Antoine Dupont, who was forced off in the 30th minute when Beirne collapsed into his knee after he was shoved while trying to clear out of a ruck. There are half a million rugby players in France, at least a couple of thousand or so professionals, Fabien Galthié managed to pick 75 of them just last year. They even have a good handful of Test-match scrum halves, Lucu, Nolann Le Garrec, Baptiste Serin, Baptiste Couilloud and Baptiste Jauneau. But they only have one Dupont. Which is why Galthié has built the team around him.
On came Lucu, like the actor playing understudy to Olivier. The entire tone of the game changed in the first minutes he was on the pitch, the Irish crowd swelled, the Irish players surged and the bewildered French were blown back into their own territory. It got worse when Pierre-Louis Barassi was forced off with a head injury after a high tackle by Calvin Nash. France had picked such a lopsided bench, with seven forwards, that it felt a good thing the players don’t have to share the same stretch of timber anymore, or else Lucu, the one solitary back, would have been stuck 10 feet up in the air, like a kid playing seesaw with a sumo.
With Barassi off too, France were forced to bring flanker Jégou on at outside-centre. It was a hell of a gamble. But it turns out that Galthié is a fair judge of the odds. In the 48th minute, with the match hanging in the balance, and while Ireland were one man down waiting for Nash to come back on to the field after his 20-minute dismissal, Galthié brought on his squad of five forwards.
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The game changed again then. Moments later, the Irish were battered back off their own ball, and Penaud was away and running. It was as if someone had slipped them into a higher gear, all of a sudden they were playing a very different sort of rugby, above and beyond what the exhausted Irish could live with. Truth is, the seven-one bench paid off.
They had too much power, too much speed, too much skill, and the game broke open, in a flood of 29 points in the next 21 minutes. Ireland, who are such an intricately organised side, a bit of clockwork engineering, collapsed in a mess of coils and springs and levers, like a watch dashed on a rock. A fair few teams have come to Dublin and gone down to epochal defeats in recent years, you wonder whether the Irish have just done likewise.
