Beyond the next game, beyond even this Six Nations and the prospect of an Irish grand slam, there is the World Cup. After Ireland’s extraordinary 32-19 victory over France, Johnny Sexton finally let slip that he’s been thinking about it, too, just the same as everyone else.
“If everything goes to plan, and we get through our group there is a chance we will play France again in the World Cup,” he said. “So it was good to get that off our back, in terms of beating them, as they were the only team we hadn’t beaten.” France had won the past three matches between them.
France and Ireland, the two best teams in the world, will play each other in the quarter-finals of the tournament if one wins their group and the other finishes runner-up. Given the way they here, it is maybe more likely they meet in the final.
“It was a top-end Test match, wasn’t it?” Sexton said “That’s what everyone wanted, and that’s what everyone got. That first half, wow, it was just end-to-end stuff.”
Sexton did not spend long thinking that far ahead. Ireland play Italy in a fortnight’s time. “We knew how big this game was in terms of the championship, but it’s not worth anything if we let it slip in the next game,” he said. “It’s been clear from the start what we want to achieve. We won a triple crown last year and we said we want to get better this year, well, to get better is to win the championship and a grand slam. How you do that is by concentrating on the next two weeks.”
Ever the perfectionist, he already had clear ideas about where Ireland need to improve. “Straight away, we need to look at the chances we created. At half-time we spoke about how we only had a 50% success rate on the chances we had when we were close to their line. We were held up a couple of times, and we had opportunities to get the ball into space earlier on a couple of occasions too.
“So there is plenty to work on. There always is. You never walk away from a game thinking ‘that was perfect’.” Andy Farrell agreed that his team “could have come away with a few more points”.
As for France, they were left wondering whether Ireland had five more than they ought to have had. James Lowe’s feet were so close to touch when he scored their second try and French TV soon found an angle the refereeing team seem to have missed, which suggested that it should have been disallowed.
“What can I say?” said the head coach, Fabien Galthié. “In the moment we could see that his foot was in touch. But we have to be fair, there was a linesman three metres from the action. There were images, but they only came out when the trial was over.”
Galthié felt Ireland “should have had five points less in the end” but he did not blame the loss on them. He said his team exposed themselves by trying to play too much rugby in their own half and spent so much energy doing it that they ran out of steam in the second half.
He was characteristically philosophical about it all. “We came here to win. It’s a defeat. It’s true that it’s been two years since we lost a game, we were on a series of 14 victories, and the series is over,” he said. “So we must also learn to live with defeat. We don’t like her in this team, she is not a friend, but we will have to spend the evening with her.”
