the Ireland Rugby Social podcast<\/a>. <\/p>\n“I think we owe them one. The key factors will be that physicality fight again. That first half against England, we lost that battle, got a bit of a telling off at half-time and came out and were a lot more physical than England.<\/p>\n
“Doing that for the full 80 minutes will be crucial. The maul tries and forward tries will be really big as well because France have a big pack as well.”<\/p>\n
Wafer, who scored in Ireland’s 38-17 loss to France in Le Mans in 2024, says silencing the noisy home support at Stade Marcel-Michelin will be crucial.<\/p>\n
“They’ve got brass bands in all the corners and our job is to make sure they go as quiet as possible,” she added. <\/p>\n
“You put a challenge up to them and all of a sudden the trumpets stop and the crowd stops and we start to impose ourselves on the game and just be absolutely dominant in it.”<\/p>\n
Wafer also said the squad will be fuelled by the pain of last year’s World Cup quarter-final defeat.<\/p>\n
Ireland led 13-0 at Exeter’s Sandy Park but ultimately succumbed to a French comeback to lose 18-13. <\/p>\n
“Like everyone, we’ll probably have a little bit of that quarter-final hurt in them,” said Wafer, who added France back row Axelle Berthoumieu’s bite on her during the World Cup game “is in the past”.<\/p>\n
“It’s probably something that’ll stay with us for a little while. I know personally I probably think about it a lot still. We get another week to rip into them.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland believe they can deliver a historic Women’s Six Nations win over France in Clermont after Saturday’s impressive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":406995,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-406994","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406994","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=406994"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/406994\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/406995"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=406994"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=406994"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=406994"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}