France begin their Six Nations title defence against Ireland on Thursday.\u00a0JULIEN DE ROSA\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n
Good evening and welcome to ESPN’s live updates of opening match of the 2026 Six Nations as France host Ireland in Paris.<\/p>\n
Les Bleus are the pre-tournament favourites and have been widely-tipped to defend the title they won last year, and they will be hoping to go one better and clinch a Grand Slam. The two sides have dominated the Six Nations in recent years, winning the last four tournaments between them with two apiece.<\/p>\n
While France are expected to kick on this year, it’s a heavily depleted Ireland side which visits Paris, with several front-line players unavailable. Andy Farrell will be asking a lot of his less experienced players tonight, with Stade de France notoriously a tough place to win.<\/p>\n
– Six Nations power rankings: England favourites? Ireland on the decline?<\/a> The tournament is also kicking off on a Thursday night<\/a> for the first time in the Six Nations era so it does not clash with the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics<\/a>, which takes place Friday in Milan, Italy.<\/p>\n Still, it won’t deter the passionate French fans, and a few travelling Irish supporters, from making their voices heard.<\/p>\n Follow live updates here for all the latest action.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"France begin their Six Nations title defence against Ireland on Thursday.\u00a0JULIEN DE ROSA\/AFP via Getty Images Good evening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":460746,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-460745","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460745","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460745"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460745\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460746"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460745"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460745"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460745"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
– Players to watch: Henry Pollock, Louis Rees-Zammit, others<\/a><\/p>\n