watching his side sweep to a 36-14 opening Six Nations win<\/a> but when imperfections were mentioned his stock retort was to mention the quality of the opposition.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s the Irish team we were playing,\u201d he explained at one point. \u201cThey are number three in the world ranking, let’s not forget, but for 50 minutes we forgot it was Ireland we were playing.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said not everything would be perfect, it is never perfect. We have to be humble, accept we make mistakes at times. It happened but not very often if you think of everything positive in this match.\u201d The focus on the green side of the fence is to look at this game and wring hands at the manner in which Ireland were outclassed by a host team that looked back to its very best at times as they romped to a five-try, five-star display.<\/p>\n
For the French, it seems as if the very identity of the opposition is only adding to the satisfaction.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we were at 29-0 it was very surprising for us,\u201d said Antoine Dupont. \u201cIt is always a very tough game when we play Ireland. They always kick a lot but we had done well on the high ball and that\u2019s why the score was as it was. We started the game very well and we kept this dynamic for almost 80 minutes.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dupont, back after his long-term injury, played a pivotal role alongside his out-half Matthieu Jalibert on the back of so much discussion as to whether these two alpha males could gel in the same team at the same time.<\/p>\n
\u201cI felt really well and I think it showed. We were able to alternate between the front row and back row. It was very accurate technically and we made passes and played on the outside. So it is very positive, although we had a difficult time at one stage, but every positive.\u201d Galthie went further.<\/p>\n
\u201cI agree with Antoine. As far as attack with the ball, the team played really well. It’s one of the best performances in attack we have shown in a long time in spite of bad weather conditions, between kicking and play through the hand.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not some second tier nation, or an Italy or a Wales that was habitually under their thumb. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283179,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43,15551],"class_list":["post-283178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news","tag-six-nations"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283178","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=283178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283179"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}