Gaffney holds his hands up

RUGBY SIX NATIONS CHAMPIONSHIP:A FORMER professional rugby player informed us he had dozed off on the couch during last Saturday's second half against Italy. He is not that old, mind, just couldn't keep his eyes open.

And yet, the suspicion is Ireland have not stalled in Declan Kidney’s second season. Instead, a belief persists that they subconsciously adopted the act of keeping their cards close to their chests. Paris is the high-stakes encounter.

The intent to obliterate Italy was there, but a lack of ingenuity saw a reversion to blunt force, against blunt opposition, perhaps with the intention of ensuring the French video analyst requires a caffeine tablet to complete his duties this week.

Not surprising then that a fairly cagey press briefing unfolded in Killiney Castle yesterday with that old Australian backline conjuror, Alan Gaffney, facing the media pack. Most coaches would find it difficult to avoid being rude in such instances, but Gaffney is cut from a different rock.

“We just didn’t get our act together as a team,” he admitted. “We weren’t trying to hold things back, the menu we had for the weekend was the menu we didn’t touch upon too much as the game went on.

“That was for a variety of circumstantial reasons, it wasn’t because we were holding back. We would have liked to have played the plays and that was one of the disappointing aspects of what we did. It wasn’t a lack of intent, we just didn’t quite get control of the game.”

Still, Ireland pulled down the shutters early, but the suspicion is Les Blues did likewise at Murrayfield. “I think they probably did, not intentionally, but that’s probably where it went. There were opportunities there and they didn’t take them. They just didn’t play as much rugby in the second half as they did in the first and allowed Scotland to get back into the game and Scotland did threaten them. I wouldn’t have thought they were in top gear.”

The opening Six Nations weekend in a nutshell really.

Then we asked Gaffney about the scrum (we had to ask somebody). The French frontrow of Tomas Domingo, William Servat and Nicolas Mass are usually re-energised by the early second-half arrival of Castres’ Luc Ducalcon and hooker Dimitri Szarzewski

“They have got an exceptional scrum, so did Italy, and the boys came out and scrummaged particularly well and they’ll be looking for a repeat performance at the weekend and there is no reason to suspect there won’t be.

“France have always been a strong scrum, (Fabien) Barcella is not available but it doesn’t matter, they have the best part of five looseheads and five tightheads of the same quality, and that’s the strength of French rugby. We’ll be focused, it’s not a concern I think.”

Everybody seems to be hyping up William Gallas’s cousin, the monstrous Mathieu Bastareaud. Two tries in Edinburgh got the Fantasy Rugby nuts chattering, but equally imposing, hard-running centres have come down Brian O’Driscoll’s channel before. What change did Ma Nonu get?

Certainly, the 21-year-old has been in imposing form for Stade Francais recently, having served an international suspension for lying about a head injury sustained outside a Wellington hotel in New Zealand last summer. The incident appears to have been chalked up to experience.

“He’s a good player, a strong player, there’s no doubt. He hasn’t played a lot of international rugby . . . He’ll be a tough nut to crack, but, alternatively, I can’t deny the quality of the people we’ve got, so I’d be thinking they may be thinking the same thing.”

It will not be about Bastareaud, unless the French cut loose early, as in 2006 and 2008, but the Irish defence is a different animal in 2010, while France missed a worrying 15 tackles against Scotland.

“There are opportunities,” said Gaffney. “There were last year, but again, if you look at their games through June, November and the first game of the Six Nations, they did vary their defence. We found that last year.

“We thought they would defend a certain way in the Six Nations, having watched all the games in the autumn, and they defended an entirely different way to the way they did in November.

“So we’re looking at the varying ways they defend and we’ve got a pretty good handle on what we think they’ll do. But with the French, expect the unexpected. We should have the ability of adapting if we need to against whatever defensive system they throw up against us. But there are areas we can have a go at irrespective of which defensive pattern they use. We will go out there and attack France, without doubt.”