Rugby/ France v Ireland: In stark contrast to the numbed thousands watching painful endgames unfold in the World Cup, this time the green-bedecked thousands stayed raucously with their team until the end.

This time too the Stade crowd stayed with their remodelled, spiritually French team more so than the "bourgeois" types of two years ago that booed Frédéric Michalak. But only one set of players and fans wanted it to end when it did.

No doubt Eddie O'Sullivan will point to Italy's plucky 23-19 defeat to England in Rome yesterday as evidence that Ireland's win a week before had been underrated, but it was great to see ambition and, increasingly, confidence flood back into Irish veins as France hung on unconvincingly at the end.

You could utterly understand the coaches' and players' desire to herald their best performance in over 10 months, for this time the dip in form and results had been much longer and much more costly.

The head coach was playing a similar tune yesterday before returning from Paris: "I'm pretty pleased with the performance but disappointed to lose the game. I thought we probably deserved to win the game on balance but we didn't get the points on the board. I felt that performance was in the team and it was certainly good to get it out there."

After what according to insiders was a barnstorming return to training last week, Paul O'Connell is scheduled to make an appearance for Munster away to Edinburgh next Friday, although understandably, O'Sullivan is "reluctant to tempt fate" with a view to the visit of Scotland next Saturday week.

The prognosis for Jerry Flannery, though his suspension will be completed by the time of the Scotland match, is less promising as he is nursing a broken hand sustained in Munster's win over Wasps.

The case for Mick O'Driscoll's inclusion from the start is also now stronger, while O'Sullivan is sure to consider Shane Horgan, more likely at the expense of Geordan Murphy, rather than play the latter at full-back.

"Scotland are probably smarting now very much after their two performances," said O'Sullivan. "They will come to Dublin with the mindset of upsetting us and the one thing the Six Nations will teach you is there are no givens and you have to earn what you get. In two weeks' time we will have to put up a big performance and if we build on yesterday we'll get that, but we can't take it for granted."

Brian O'Driscoll afterwards spoke of owing themselves and O'Sullivan a performance, because he had stayed loyal largely to the same group of players - and no one could dispute that, even if Saturday's effort in Paris had been helped no end by a modicum of change - in the person of Jamie Heaslip especially.

O'Driscoll also gave credit to the contribution of Ronan O'Gara at Friday's team meeting and, typically, O'Gara put Saturday's performance and seventh defeat in succession to France in context.

"A lot happens in sport, as in you can look after your own situations," he said. "For Munster I'm used to winning and I expected to win today. From a personal point of view I'm very disappointed, from a team point of view very disappointed. I hope fellas aren't happy with where they are inside. At the end of the day we were beaten again in Paris. That's the bottom line."

As for whatever he said on Friday, O'Gara revealed: "I have to keep some things private in terms of motivation for the team, and that's exactly what it was.

"I think we're trying to get credibility back in the Irish team and so far we haven't done that and I think today we took a step in the right direction, but this team needs a win.

"It's been a long time since Ireland have played well as a team and all I asked for was that we were honest, and I think we were honest today. But we need to kick on."

At the death, the Irish forwards had utter mastery over the French pack in scrums and mauls.

"We should never have let that ball go out near the end," said O'Gara, as much in admonishment of himself as of team-mates over an opportunity lost. "We just needed to keep pounding away with the forwards."

As part of their current experimental mode, France are almost declining to play territory and indeed, if Ireland had a mind to use Robert Kearney's boot more they might even have had more than the remarkable 63-37 territorial split.

Even more astonishingly, Ireland had the ball 49 times in the French 22, be it with scrum, lineout or ruck, whereas France only had seven visits to the Irish 22.

For all their improved depth, with runners coming harder onto the ball, Ireland's back play did not have the same cutting edge or ability to work even one-on-ones or two-on-twos in real space.

Tellingly, in making far more tackles, 125 to 72, the French used their defence as the springboard for two of their four tries.

In a sense, both coaches got out of jail. Marc Lièvremont used Saturday's unfolding events as if Stade de France were his personal laboratory, and it's doubtful in the extreme that he would have removed Nicolas Mas, Dimitri Szarzewski and Jean-Baptiste Elissalde had the score not been 26-6, or in any case had this been two years down the line, a championship decider or a World Cup tie, much less have had such a callow bench.

"You learn from suffering," maintained a grinning Lièvremont, like a scientist who had just completed an informative if flawed experiment.

"If you want to make me say that the match turned when our replacements joined the game, I'll not go there with you.

"We foundered collectively; we started going backwards in all our actions; but I didn't then see any outstanding difference between the young ones and those less so."

The introduction of the 30-year-old loosehead Julien Brugnaut, a division-two prop last year, and five others from a bench containing the princely total of 23 caps was an open invitation to the Munster-honed Irish pack to scent blood.

"Conceding a penalty try is the ultimate indignity," conceded Mas, admittedly having made way for Brugnaut, of a shame that no French side has suffered in 133 matches, dating back to their 34-27 win over the Pumas in Buenos Aires in 1996.

Suffice to say, the French frontrow union and many more besides will storm the FFR headquarters if Lièvremont's taste for experimentation prompts a similar outcome to even costlier effect when England's Matt Stephens, Andrew Sheridan and company come calling in two weeks' time.