Reddan looks at the bigger picture

Six Nations:Just when we had begun to think that the decent thing to do was look away when the Irish team walked on to the pitch, up they jump and for 40 minutes strut like a Maximus-driven Roman legion. Hard-bitten by their failures over the last six months few are going to run off at the mouth after one good run at the coliseum.

The team has good reason to be cautious. Laurels bestowed on them by the media have a habit of being swiped back on a whim.

None, least of all the relative newcomer Eoin Reddan, believe any longer in the jaded concept of glorious defeat. He knows the gladiators have kept the lions off their backs for a little longer but don't ask the Irish scrumhalf to buy into any overstated claims of Ireland turning the corner. As the World Cup and the match against Italy have been put behind them, so too has France. Scotland will pose another select band of challenges with the players spurred on by the disappointment of defeat.

"It's not easy to be brave enough to pick out the things that have gone well in a match when there's so much negativity surrounding games," says Reddan. "It's a challenge for people to do that. We'll look at the French game the same way. It's a challenge to find things that you can genuinely be proud of and think were good, even though we lost the game - because no one likes to lose a game. There's no such thing as moral victories.

"The challenge is to be hard on yourself but to be fair on yourself as well. I'm not even talking about this week, I'm talking about how things have progressed over the last few months. I don't think there is anything to get excited about yet in terms of last week."

Knocking Reddan off his middle ground is a difficult proposition. You ask him for emotion and some measure of team frustration and he hands you back sagacity and reason. You get the impression that it is only his own impeccable manners and discipline that prevent him from saying "Let's cut the crap lads".

Parsing the Irish rugby team's psyche on the strength of 40 minutes good and six months bad does actually seem a little frivolous. But what was it they discovered that turned the key. From wide-eyed bewilderment about what was broken, do they know what they fixed?

"No, I mean in the World Cup we had four games and we have had two since. That's six games. If you watch a club side over a season, regularly they go through seven or eight games and they don't know why they play badly, but they'll fix it and they'll get on with it. It happens," he explains.

"Results went against us and we ended up in tough positions at the World Cup needing tries and that sort of thing. It was tough. I don't think anyone felt kind of hopeless, I don't think the type of guys who reach this level of rugby think like that.

"You can always believe, you just have to look around the dressingroom to think, 'we can do this'. So we always believed. But it sounds like now that we've won a World Cup. Do you know what I mean?"

While Ireland will look at some of the work done in Paris as respectable, others will see it as a Damascian conversion simply because of the contrast with what went before. Twelve months ago we would have expected excellence regularly served. Other parts of the performance, though, will be viewed with a more jaundiced eye. There are different realities at work. One French try pitched a winger against Denis Leamy, another was sensational opportunism from a kick that bounced off at a clever angle when it hit Brian O'Driscoll. Bad luck or French genius?

"As Irish people, we are very quick to say everything is wrong and everything is terrible. So the challenge then is to try to take something from the game that will help you the next time. I think the squad has done that and we have stuck together well. But we are by no means through the stormy weather."

Scotland bring another dynamic to Croke Park. Ireland will be favourites. That tag. Oh how Ireland love that tag!

"I don't think we can get caught up with who is favourite for games because there are going to be times in your life when you're favourites by a mile and underdogs by a mile," says Reddan with that unflinching stare he has brought to these proceedings. "If you can't deal with both then you're not really at the races," he concluded.