So it’s taken me almost two days to get my head around what the hell happened on Saturday in Paris. Basically I’ve reached the view that Ireland did nothing much different in the last 30 minutes but the French decided to go on their week break a bit early. Having watched the match again there’s no doubt in my mind that the French were trying in the last 30 minutes — they weren’t!

So where do we go from here, to be honest I have no idea. Well I would make some selection changes, O’Kelly has been past it for about two seasons now but has yet to get dropped, but the difference when O’Callaghan comes on these days is incredible. Andrew Trimble should be given a shot also. I’d also make changes in the back-row but that’s never going to happen.

So with respect to Wales, what’s the plan? Well I’d throttle them upfront, they didn’t have a pack last year when they mugged everyone else to win a Championship and this year they’ve got an even worse pack, so take them on upfront, wear them down and then cut through their centres with our far far superior backline.

In the meantime it’s back to the Celtic League next week. As a Munster man I’ll be hoping our 9/10 pairing will work a lot lot better this time than in the last Celtic League match without Stringer & O’Gara.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 13th, 2006 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Six Nations, International. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.