Grand hopes slammed

RUGBY:Wonderful, unforgettable occasion. Lousy finish. A great day except for the last two minutes, as Paul O'Connell succinctly put it. That is life, and that is assuredly sport, but after Croke Park had fairly crackled and throbbed for 80 increasingly dramatic minutes yesterday, somehow c'est la vie couldn't possibly encapsulate the crushing emotions at Ireland's sporting citadel.

The majority of a raucous 81,500-plus crowd were simply numbed.

The bounce of a ball was a popular refrain afterwards, not least by the Ireland coach, Eddie O'Sullivan, and as Croke Park witnessed yesterday, the bounce of a rugby ball can be particularly capricious and cruel.

An Irish team that had dug deep to extract a big second-half performance from a slow, sluggish, nervous start, had seemed to have done enough when Ronan O'Gara, scorer of all their points, edged them 17-13 in front entering the penultimate minute of the match.

That would have been dandy. Bring on England in a fortnight's time for a Six Nations summit meeting. Bring back Brian O'Driscoll and Peter Stringer too.

The Grand Slam was, fleetingly, very much on.

But France, as they did for much of the first half and again in what was for Ireland a harrowing, truly nightmarish endgame, still had to trust their 21-year-old outhalf Lionel Beauxis to leave his hanging restart just beyond the 10-metre line. They still had to compete for the ball to force the ricochet infield. Yannick Jauzion and his alert backs still had to claim that dastardly bouncing ball, and when stopped in the right corner, they still had to puncture a heavily populated green wall.

In their desperation to drift across and not be outflanked, John Hayes, Neil Best and company were checked a little flatfooted, but Vincent Clerc still had to take on the responsibility, and possess the ability, to cut through and score. They made full use of that one bounce.

France's captain, Raphael Ibanez, scorer of their first try, had revealed that they'd had a team meeting to explain and discuss the historical importance of Croke Park to Ireland.

"We know that the Irish will be very disappointed because it is part of their history, but sometimes you meet the French," he reasoned, with a beaming Gallic shrug.

The reality is that Ireland did not play especially well from the start. They will assuredly lament not having a real go and perhaps making even more daring use of their backs and, at the end, they know better than anyone that they had the winning of the game, had they secured the restart or kept Clerc and co out.

That will only add to the pain.

A first Six Nations title in 22 years is still feasible if Ireland win their remaining games, and having England play at Jones's Road next Saturday week under the evening lights is still going to make the hairs stand on the back of the neck. Eddie O'Sullivan reminded us as much afterwards.

Maintaining that "the boys had played their guts out and it a cruel way to lose a game of rugby", he added: "We've got 13 days for our next game here at Croke Park against England, and we can't just roll over and die now because we lost a game like that."

Yet it was hard to warm to that particular theme there and then, even, no doubt, for the coach himself.

For the French it was a joyous win and showed the motivation hosting the World Cup is already providing them. That is their holy grail. Afterwards, their head coach, Bernard Laporte, admitted: "Our primary goal was to ensure that Ireland will not be coming to the World Cup as the champions of Europe."

O'Sullivan said he would welcome the meeting in the pool stages of the World Cup, but at the Stade de France the majority of the 80,000 crowd will be singing Allez les Bleus, not The Fields of Athenry.

Though it seemed merely a minor detail here, this was undoubtedly a significant psychological blow for the French with the Coupe du Monde in mind.

For much of the first half it was the French who rose to the occasion, found their free-flowing, touchline-to-touchline rhythm, controlling the ball much better and taking the game to Ireland.

Grateful to be only 13-11 in arrears at the interval after a superbly worked try - O'Gara looping around Ireland's outstanding player on the day, David Wallace - Ireland played with much more aggression and intensity in the second half, crashing into the French in contact or at ruck time.

There still could have been more precision in the handling and the linking, though had the finest player of this or perhaps any Irish generation not been obliged to rest a hamstring in the stands, they might well have found a way through for the decisive try. Instead, they were left open to a last-ditch mugging, and they were cruelly mugged.

Ireland might have had a penalty (with referee Steve Walsh, already playing advantage) when Marcus Horan supported Hickie's snipe close-in and was tugged by Imanol Harinordoquy and slightly blocked by Clement Poitrenaud when failing to gather his own chip-ahead. But the advantage had been played and Ireland might also reflect that they could have deliberately knocked on, à la George Gregan, and taken the first three points on offer.

It's a moot issue, as is Walsh's decision to haul back Geordan Murphy when making off for an 80-metre intercept try.

To his credit, O'Sullivan refused to find grounds for debate in the performance of the Kiwi official. Mr Walsh does not look as if he suffers a crisis of confidence when he gazes in the mirror, but O'Sullivan is right: Walsh is a good referee.

Alas, chances like this and days like this don't come along often. It just underlines how difficult Grand Slams are to come by.