Antoine Dupont will return to captain defending champions France for Thursday evening’s Guinness Six Nations curtain-raiser against Ireland in Paris.<\/p>\n
The Toulouse scrum-half has not played at international level since rupturing the ACL in his right knee during Les Bleus’ 42-27 win in Dublin last March.<\/p>\n
Head coach Fabien Galthie raised some eyebrows by leaving centre Gael Fickou and wing Damian Penaud out of his squad for the championship but has named a formidable backline.<\/p>\n
In the absence of injured fly-half Romain Ntamack, Matthieu Jalibert will partner Dupont, while Louis Bielle-Biarrey – last year’s player of the tournament after scoring eight tries – starts on the left wing.<\/p>\n
Cian Prendergast and Jacob Stockdale start as Tadhg Furlong misses out of Six Nations opener<\/a><\/p>\n Yoram Moefana is joined by Nicolas Depoortere in midfield, with Theo Attissogbe on the right wing and Thomas Ramos at full-back.<\/p>\n Galthie also overlooked former captain Gregory Alldritt for his squad before veteran prop Uini Atonio was forced to retire due to a heart problem.<\/p>\n Anthony Jelonch takes Alldritt’s place at number eight, between flankers Francois Cros and Oscar Jegou.<\/p>\n Props Jean-Baptiste Gros and Dorian Aldegheri pack down with hooker Julian Marchand in the front row, ahead of locks Charles Ollivon and Mickael Guillard.<\/p>\n France: T Ramos; T Attissogbe, N Depoortere, Y Moefana, L Bielle-Biarrey; M Jalibert, A Dupont (capt); J Gros, J Marchand, D Aldegheri, C Ollivon, M Guillard, F Cros, O Jegou, A Jelonch.<\/p>\n Replacements: P Mauvaka, R Neti, R Montagne, H Auradou, E Meafou, L Nouchi, B Serin, K Gourgues.<\/p>\n \n Listen to the RT\u00c9 Rugby podcast on Apple Podcasts<\/a>, Spotify<\/a> or wherever you get your podcasts<\/a>, and email us at sportpodcasts@rte.ie<\/p>\n Follow every Ireland game in the Guinness Six Nations on RT\u00c9.ie\/Sport and the RT\u00c9 News app, or listen to live commentary on RT\u00c9 Radio 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Antoine Dupont will return to captain defending champions France for Thursday evening’s Guinness Six Nations curtain-raiser against Ireland…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":{"0":"post-278671","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}