Honest toil pays off in vital fractions

There are days when a full back climbs out of his bed, draws the curtains, looks out the window and thinks, "Oh no!" Saturday was one of those days, and first impressions didn't lie.

When Geordan Murphy came down to the front of the Radisson Hotel such was the force of the wind he could barely open the door, and when he did the water from the fountain in the front courtyard sprayed him. "Why me, Lord, why me?"

Not even a minute in and Ireland have an attacking scrum. The French make it screw back awkwardly, and Dimitri Yachvili prevents Peter Stringer from getting the ball away cleanly. Murphy has set off from right to left for a planned move, but instead the ball drops at his feet.

He gathers, straightens himself, and sweetly connects with a 45-metre drop goal which sails high between the posts on one of Lansdowne Road's typically notorious, blustery days.

It's one of his party pieces. He'd nailed an even longer one against Saracens this season. But this one was pure, off-the-cuff instinct - and what instincts, what talent he has.

Ultimately, you could say it was the classiest moment of an anxious match, or at any rate - with David Humphreys landing four penalties from six to Francois Gelez's four from seven - the classiest moment to have any effect on the scoreboard. And you could say it made all the difference.

It also settled him, settled the team, warmed up the crowd and earned Ireland a lead they never relinquished. They used the lead smartly, too, always trying to put the pressure on the French, and then hung tough in the end-game.

When Eddie O'Sullivan looked out the window he knew it was going to be a day for mistakes, and contented himself with the knowledge that the team who made the fewer mistakes would win.

Viewing it in that light, he couldn't be too critical of any aspect of his team's efforts, save for the lack of momentum or dynamism from the lineout, especially in the first half.

As O'Sullivan also deduced, no one was going to play perfectly. In the event, France played with significantly more imperfection: 18 errors to 10. That rankled with them more than anything. They were bitterly upset with themselves.

Bernard Laporte was particularly upset about the French scrum wilting twice late on. He and they weren't expecting that: Sylvain Marconnet and Christian Califano might pay a price.

What a feather in the caps of the Irish pack, and especially Marcus Horan's. In the circumstances, he was promoted for his first championship start and came of age on this day.

About all Laporte would take solace from was the French defence. Their speed up on the Irish backline was extraordinary, and Andre Watson appeared far harsher on the home side for not obeying the hindmost foot than he was on Les Bleus.

Be that as it may, Humphreys said he'd never known such in-yer-face pressure.

In truth, Humphreys couldn't engineer space out wide by outflanking the advancing blue line, nor did he turn them with chips over the top. With Victor Costello, Kevin Maggs and Brian O'Driscoll carrying a heavy load, Ireland lacked penetration.

With the Humphreys-Maggs-O'Driscoll axis also pushing up hard and quick, the exchanges were suffocatingly tight. There scarcely seemed room to breath.

Coupled with the unremittingly tough forward battle, the amount of time the backs put boot to leather, be it in aerial ping-pong, for position or as an attacking ploy, made the game seem like a step back in time.

Try-scoring chances, such as they existed at all, were more likely to come from kicks ahead, forward pressure or mistakes-cum-turnovers.

France, it seemed, tried to play marginally the wider, more ball-in-hand game. Humphreys and Co kicked more for territory. In the first quarter, particularly, it looked curious, but the scoreline justified the means. Winning is everything - the rest is gossip.

If ever a game needed to be won 1-0 this was it. Indeed, it wasn't that neither offence deserved to score a try, more that neither defence deserved to concede one. France missed only six tackles in the whole match. The game was 20 minutes old before Costello gave Ireland any go forward ball.

Whether it was Costello or Maggs up the middle, or O'Driscoll wriggling yards out of nothing, every inch was hard-earned. But nobody can question Costello's work-rate nowadays and he had another stormer. So too did the centres. This was Maggsy's kind of day, and he led Ireland's tackle count.

But on days like this, the great one is prepared to get down and dirty with the best of them. When France came knocking imposingly in first-half injury time, Olivier Magne looked set to score, only for Murphy to hold him up and O'Driscoll to shunt him back with a thunderous tackle. On this day it was an Irish statement of intent.

True, when defensive coach Mike Ford scrutinises the video he'll find plenty to mull over, as Ireland were probably "busted", as he'd put it, more than the French. But as O'Sullivan also observed, Ireland's scrambling defence, epitomised by Peter Stringer's covering, was excellent.

The scoreline was probably bang on. Ireland deserved to win, but, in a predictably titanic struggle, not by much. Then again, a winning margin of more than a score was always going to be a landslide, all the more so in the conditions.

It's been that way in five of the last six meetings, with last year's Grand Slam tour de force by the French standing out even more now as a one-off.

In the cold light of day, there was little in it. The statistics will show that Ireland had more of the ball, by about three minutes, and more of the territory, by about four-and-a-half minutes. Maybe they wanted it that little more, or perhaps they simply had a marginally greater grasp of what was required to get there.

In a game of fractions, Ireland were fractionally better. "Hard work" was Eddie O'Sullivan's answer when asked for the reason behind a 42-point turnaround since the last meeting.

They're as honest as the day is long, and with each passing game their winning mentality strengthens. The best might still be to come.