[quote=“Mac, post: 427234”]
Just thinking that the last time we won in Paris (2000 wasn’t it?) both Humphries and O’Gara were vying for the pole position. O’Gara started and Humphries came on after 60 mins. I recall him nailing a penalty in the last 10 mins from a fair distance out. Humphries played a completely different type of game than O’Gara did as you’d expect. The French couldn’t handle it. There’s no reason why we couldn’t do that next weekend, and try and use the full 22 for tactical reasons for a change. Bar at prop, there’s not a lot of difference between the bench and the starting 15 so we should use all the resources open to us. [/quote]
Have a read of this Mac, decent article in yesterdays Trib about that day 10 years ago.
Time set a few more rights this weekend
Children of la révolution
After 28 years of yearning, the events of 2000 in Paris marked a milestone for a young Irish side and now they can set another
Malachy Clerkin
Take-off: Brian O’Driscoll’s hat-trick gave a very young Ireland their first taste of victory in Paris since 1972 This is how it was. When Denis Hickie reached up a hand to pick Christophe Lamaisson’s pass out of the air 12 years ago, he didn’t just have 55 yards of the Stade de France between him and the French try-line. Layered on top of the physical yardage needed for an intercept try was 18 years of Irish heads banging against brick-walled French defences, of no Irishman scoring a try on French soil since Freddie McLennan in 1980. Warren Gatland’s side ended up losing the match but they’d at least made a referee put his arm in the air. As Neil Francis put it in these pages at the time, “I never want to hear Freddie McLennan’s name again”.
Paris in the Five Nations held all the romance of a blown tyre back then. Ireland had last won a match in the city in 1972 at the Stade Colombes and indeed famously never won a game at Parc des Princes in the modern era. To say there was hurt would imply there was expectation to begin with. There wasn’t.
Or at least there hadn’t been. Sitting in the dressing room after that 18-16 defeat in '98, Paddy Johns opined that it was easier to take when you lost by 40 than by two. Johns was an old soldier from a lost decade and by that afternoon, he had been on the losing side in 25 of his 39 Ireland matches. That’s what we did to our rugby players back then. Sent them out into the storm unloved, shrugged our shoulders when they came back soaked through.
Help was on its way, though. Exactly a year and two days beforehand at Lansdowne Road, a thrilling Leinster Schools Senior Cup semi-final between Blackrock and Clongowes had finished with the Blackrock out-half taking three drops at goal in the closing minutes and missing them all, the final one scudding off the outside of the right-hand upright to hand Clongowes a 16-14 win. The Clongowes full-back that day was Gordon D’Arcy, the Blackrock out-half was Brian O’Driscoll.
Spin the clock forward by three years and both players have played for Ireland but D’Arcy looks to unkinder eyes like being a one-time deal. This O’Driscoll boy is different, though. In 10 games at centre, he’s scored three tries and even managed a drop goal. He’s fast, if a little pudgy, with Evostick hands and a quick brain. But he’s rugby’s little secret just for the moment.
By 2000, a generation of Irish players had been through the mill so often it was little wonder that morale had been ground to dust in some of them. If losing by two points in '98 had been bad, 1999 had been worse, a last-minute David Humphreys kick to win at Lansdowne drifting just wide to let France away with a 10-9 victory they scarcely deserved. In between-time had come the World Cup debacle in Lens and an almighty tonking from England in Twickenham to start the Six Nations. It’s history now that Gatland threw caution to the wind and threw youth at the problem against Scotland and Italy, winning the two games by an aggregate of 69 points. But Paris was supposed to put a halt to the gallop, if for no other reason than it always did.
“We went there under very little pressure,” says Hickie. “Nobody expected very much from us. But we had good belief going from the wins over Scotland and Italy and we went there with a gameplan that was based around attacking rather than containment. We were emboldened by the selection. It was a young team. We were, I wouldn’t say cheeky is the right word but, you know, up for giving it a go.”
As a measure of just how green that Ireland team was, consider that only six of the side that took the field against France had started more than 10 international tests. Even Anthony Foley, who’d made his Ireland debut in 1995, had never faced France in Paris.
There was a chutzpah there, and not just in the youngsters. An hour before the game kicked off, Peter Clohessy looked out on to the pitch to see France out-half Gerald Merceron practising his kicks. Seeing mischief where others saw a routine exercise, Clohessy calmly strolled out on to the pitch in his track-suit top, went right across the line of Merceron’s kick and started digging his studs into the ground as though he was testing the surface. The cat-calls that rained down from the stands were fodder, nothing less. Merceron stood with his hands on his hips for a few minutes until Clohessy finished up his little charade and went down the other end to stand smiling beside Mick Galwey. Job done.
That said, for all the Irish team’s new-found sense of spirit and endeavour, the opening period went pretty much to form. “The thing about playing France in Paris,” says Hickie, “is that it’s almost difficult to articulate the extent of the onslaught you undergo in that first 20 minutes. I distinctly remember at one point looking across at Kieron Dawson and the pair of us were blowing hard. What you take from it is if you can withstand it and still be in the game, you’re in with a shout.”
Withstand it they did, even though it took plenty out of them. Hickie made a brilliant tackle to save a French try, O’Driscoll likewise in a hit on Philippe Bernat-Salles that left him dazed momentarily. If that was the first sign of the enormous self-harm he’d indulge in over the following decade to keep Ireland’s line safe, a more obvious display of his talents followed soon after. A searing midfield break off a Ronan O’Gara skip pass sent Ireland into the French half for more or less the first time, and a few phases later O’Driscoll popped up infield of Malcolm O’Kelly to run in his first try of the day.
It’s easy to forget at this remove but what followed was a pulsating jamboree of a match. O’Driscoll’s try had put Ireland 7-6 ahead on 23 minutes but France took the lead back almost immediately through scrum-half Christophe Laussauq. Merceron’s conversion made it 13-7 but Dawson had a great chance to put a reply on the board within minutes, only to knock on with the line at his mercy.
If there was a turning point, it was early in the second half when Hickie pulled off another massive try-saving tackle on hooker Marc Dal Maso. Merceron had kicked France 16-7 in front by this stage and would stretch it to 19-7 before Ireland got back into it. But a Dal Maso try would surely have killed them off. As it was, they sensed they had a chance.
“We definitely got a giddy feeling,” says Hickie. “Our plan was to think little unless we had to and to run a lot. We were better organised than them, had a better gameplan and we also had better players than they gave us credit for. Brian and Hendo were a great centre partnership too. I think people forget how good Hendo was.”
If they do, YouTube can put them right. Rob Henderson’s break for O’Driscoll’s second try, his strength in the tackle and his delay of the offload to chime with his partner’s run, it was all poetry. And when O’Driscoll shot onto a loose ball to zip past Emile N’Tamack for his hat-trick to bring Ireland back to within a point six minutes from time, anything was possible. And given he’d broken his own heart along with everyone else’s with a last-kick miss the previous year at Lansdowne, it was only right Humphreys should win it this time with a late penalty. Ireland 27, France 25.
Nothing was ever the same. When Clohessy and Keith Wood cried in each other’s arms in the dressing room afterwards, they cried tears that came from years of failure. The young bucks around them would know that too in time but not to the same grinding extent and, ultimately, they’d find it was worth it. All that’s left to tick off the list now is to do it again next week, for they haven’t done it since.
But there was a time when we thought they wouldn’t do it at all. We shouldn’t forget that.
mclerkin@tribune.ie
