Ireland v France: Gerry Thornley finds Reggie Corrigan more eager than ever for battle, conscious the now-or-never cliché has real relevance for him.

It's a relatively unseemly 1.30pm kick-off for professional sportsmen who love their match-day routine. Instead of the normal post-9am awakening, Reggie Corrigan will arise from his slumber no later than 8.30am. The French are in town, and they usually provoke a slightly different mindset too.

Given the need to get in two meals, there'll be no dallying before breakfast, which will be protein-based - porridge and some form of eggs. The forwards will have a meeting for 15 or 20 minutes, then head off to a venue for about 30 minutes' line-out practice, while the backs will do some stretching, passing and the like. "The poncey stuff that they do," quips Corrigan.

Aside from fine-tuning the lineout calls, it beats hanging around in the hotel. It's a good way of getting some air in the lungs, and relaxing. He won't feel like eating lunch the requisite three hours before kick-off, but loading up on carbohydrates, with some boring pasta and chicken dish, is imperative. Back to his room then, packing up his bags, making sure he has everything.

One more meeting then, when Eddie O'Sullivan will have his final say. It will be measured and incisive. The team bus is a fairly solemn, quiet place, with everyone tuned in to his own I-pod. Ever since his debut, Corrigan has always played U2, usually more upbeat stuff, like Mofo, Vertigo and Elevation.

Escorted by the outriders from the Citywest Hotel, he loves it when the bus nears the ground, coming down Haddington Road, past "the 51", the Beggars Bush, seeing the food stalls and the crowds cheering. "It's quite an exciting time. It gets the adrenalin going."

Arriving about an hour and a half before kick-off, they'll have a walk around the pitch, return to the dressingroom, do some stretches, then back out for the warm-up. The last 10 or 15 minutes before kick-off, in the dressingroom, is when it gets noisiest. During the anthems, Corrigan will try to stay warm and focused, while also soaking up the atmosphere. "Then bang, before you know it, you're into it."

As a front-rower, "bang" seems particularly apposite when playing Les Bleus. "It's funny, with other teams you can look at scrums, analyse them and say to yourself 'they might try to fade on a scrum here, they might try and get an angle here, they might try and wheel here'. With the French there's just no doubts in your mind as to what's going to happen. It's going to be smashed into you, and it's going to keep smashing into you.

"From my point of view it's an easier game, in the sense that you know exactly what to expect from the French front row. You know it's going to be a painful, tiring day at the office. And if you have the energy to do anything else around the pitch fair play to you. That's the way you have to look at it."

The French have always been the team he feared most in this year's championship, and long before the campaign started. Nothing about what he saw when they played Wales a fortnight ago has altered his view.

The second half may have questioned their resolve under pressure, "but being honest about it, I felt they should have beaten the Welsh out the gate. It was like the France of old."

He also vividly remembers the last two meetings, both defeats, and especially the World Cup quarter-final.

"That's the kind of thing that sticks with me, not all this talk about the French don't travel, the French are under all this pressure, they're an unsettled side. To me that's rubbish. What I see is that if the French get a good start to the game, if they get a few passes together, if they put us under pressure, we're in for an unbelievably tough day at the office. I still believe it's the toughest game yet."

For Corrigan, French opposition and the personal battles within probably provide the ultimate challenge, and the ultimate sense of satisfaction if it goes well. Corrigan always maintained that Franck Tournaire was the toughest prop he faced, and the Califano-Ibanez-Tournaire combo the strongest front row.

Today's set-to will be with Perpignan's blocky, mobile Nicolas Mas. "It's as if they have a mould over there that keeps churning them out."

Ironically, he had a call from Trevor Brennan last week and he feels he'd have enjoyed and absorbed French rugby and its culture as his old Leinster team-mate has done, although perhaps not so much the, eh, less regulated scrum contest.

"There's a part of you that definitely would," admits Corrigan. "And then there's a little voice in the back of your mind that says, 'are you crazy'?"

Not that he has any regrets about the way his career has panned out since he exchanged his job with a freight company to make the leap of faith into professionalism on an initial £7,500-per-year contract back in 1997, supplementing his income as a pub bouncer.

A straight-as-a-dye, down-to-earth bloke, Corrigan reckons that - aside from the fact it's contributed to his longevity - he appreciates the professional way of life all the more for having had a life beforehand.

He sustained four broken bones in his back when playing against Boland in the 1998 tour opener in South Africa courtesy of a blatant knee into his lower back, and the making of him was rebuilding his career with Leinster, becoming captain along the way, while three years out of the loop post-Lens.

The Irish front row gets a hard press compared to other sections of the team, perhaps because the other sections are so celebrated, but "it goes in one ear and out the other. While we probably don't destroy other teams, we have beaten the world champions twice, beaten Australia when they were world champions, held our own in New Zealand and South Africa, who we then beat at home, and we seem to have played France and the Pumas more than anyone else. Now if you're getting totally destroyed in the scrums you're not going to continually win these games."

Marcus Horan aside, there's hardly a conveyor belt producing ready-made replacements either, which Corrigan believes is not unique to Ireland. But, aside from the understandable depowering of scrums at under-age level for safety reasons, he cites the invaluable experience he had of playing A games against the likes of Kees Meuwws and Conrad Visagie.

It's been a late-developing learning curve, and it's perhaps wrong to say it's now or never, but for Corrigan there'll be fewer chances than for most.

"Last year when we won the Triple Crown I was saying to myself: 'Jaysus, how good is that?' I never thought I'd get it. There are very few opportunities left for me to win things. That's why losing the semi-final with Leinster to Perpignan was so gut-wrenching. I knew even then, two years ago, there were few opportunities. This is another massive opportunity this year in terms of the Grand Slam.

"I hate using the words Grand Slam because as far as I'm concerned people don't realise it's so far away from us at the moment. The two toughest games in the competition are still to come. But then you go to your room and you think 'well, hold on a second, if we do win the next two games we have got a Grand Slam'.

"And I'm saying to myself as one of the oldest players in the squad, 'you probably won't be in that situation again, so why not grab it while you can'? And the same goes with Leinster in the quarter-final, albeit an absolutely monstrous game. These are massive opportunities, and you can't let them slip by."

As he will today, he's relishing every minute of this odyssey.