Six Nations 2023: Inside Ireland’s preparation for vital France clash

“Ya, go ahead,” says David Ó Síocháin to the cameraman.

He walks along the sideline and across to a bundle of Irish rugby players, looks down into the lens and shuffles towards the group, stopping inches from the huddle.

Conor Murray is nearby, indifferently poking a ball around the ground with his toe, ignoring the intrusion.

One of a team of four, Netflix are embedded in the Irish squad for a Six Nations Championship documentary due out after the World Cup and before next year’s annual tournament.

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They were with the team when it travelled to Quinto de Lago in Portugal last week. They will be in the Aviva Stadium on Saturday. The French team will also have a crew in tow. Rugby is riding the Netflix wave.

“They are getting a bit deeper in interviews with the players,” says Ó Síocháin. “They are adjusting to the cameras. It is striking a balance in the environment.”

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[ Gerry Thornley: Formidable France fully prepared for what they see as key test ]

Early in the week and already Ireland’s tasks are mounting. Beat France. Win a Six Nations Championship. Travel to the World Cup as the top ranked team. Deliver a television programme.

The players arrived in on Monday after beating Wales in Cardiff. It was a day of reviews and meetings and offbeat chores. Tuesday is boots on the ground on the indoor pitch on the campus at Sport Ireland in Dublin.

Jamison Gibson-Park and Cian Healy were late withdrawals before Wales last week. They are nowhere to be seen under the giant roof. Tadhg Furlong too. The week is already taking a challenging shape with the starting line bearing down too fast.

Which one is Michael Milne, asks a photographer. The uncapped Leinster loosehead prop joined the Irish squad on Monday.

“Cropped, dark hair,” comes the reply. Is James Ryan out there yet, he asks. “Not yet.” Caolin Blade? “No.”

Hooker Dan Sheehan is walking slowly across the pitch with an exaggerated knee lift, his hands loosely jangling in the air like a Pentecostal preacher. It speaks Jimmy Lee Swagger, televangelist. But there will be no divine intervention for his hamstring.

[ Netflix documentary series on 2023 Six Nations worth six figures to each nation ]

Winger Mack Hansen, wearing a harness like a spooked pony, is pulling a physiotherapist across the synthetic grass, lurching from side to side.

In the corner, where sunlight illuminates a couple of green yards of pitch, the black bobbing bun of hair is unmistakably James Lowe. A try-scorer against Wales, he is smashing the ball into a giant poster behind the goal. “Team of Us,” it says.

It is morning in the Irish rugby village. The players are busy and silently diligent. Some are almost devotional, sitting alone striking yoga poses.

They are a bustling throng tending stiff muscles and sore bones, running lengths of the pitch refining their gait, lengthening their stride before they lurch to the outside pitch and begin to streamline a game for a much different challenge to the one Warren Gatland posed.

Wales are not France and the French team in Italy were not France either. Last year’s France has yet to arrive and behave like the Grand Slam France on a 14-match streak.

Four days out there’s also the frisson of competitive tension. High stakes. The best, France, against the highest ranked, Ireland. The winner takes the pot, takes the top ranking, takes the kudos. Defeat for Ireland and where the algorithms leave the team then in the World Cup calculation brings another conundrum.

[ Six Nations 2023: James Lowe slams shut talk of France game being a decider ]

Lowe has never been on a winning Ireland team against the French. Still, Andy Farrell put him on the wing after time out in New Zealand for a personal matter. He repaid it with a length of the pitch gallop for his seventh international try.

“I’m like a bad smell,” says Lowe. “I’m back, not going anywhere and I’m ready to rumble. We know it’s a different French beast. The France that we know is going to turn up.”

And if Ireland don’t beat France in Dublin what to expect against them at their own World Cup in Paris.

[ Six Nations 2023: Five things Ireland need to do to beat France ]

“Jeez, good question,” he says.

Far from French infatuation, the Irish squad have been more concentrated on creating their own team character, building an identity that they can uniquely call their own. It provides security of purpose.

Farrell doesn’t look for machines in players, although he needs discipline. The repeating message is the skills they possess and the point of difference that has gotten them this far is uniquely qualified to serve them further. That and the given structural tools can hurt any side.

He is a permissive coach, where Joe Schmidt tended towards prescriptive. Farrell allows players, he doesn’t prevent them, and the habitat he has created contains a self-charging energy pack.

From the ashes of England’s calamitous World Cup in 2015, where he was assistant to Stuart Lancaster, Farrell has created an Irish team with a sharp sense of self-determination.

“Everyone talks about how good an environment it is here, and it’s not rubbish,” says Dave Kilcoyne. The Munster prop was told on the morning of the Wales match he was playing. Paul O’Connell was getting out of a lift in the team hotel and turned. “Are you ready, kid?” That was that.

“It’s imposing a game that we know we can play,” says Lowe of how he sees Irish team identity. “It’s tight shapes. It’s at the line. It’s being combative and physical. It’s very, very easy to say. Then you get to France and get walloped in the first few contacts and you start second guessing yourself.

“That’s going to happen. You’re going to lose a few battles and have to play a bit smarter. We know we’ve got a shape that can break down most teams.

“And the French are physical. I think it would be silly to say they’re not bigger than us. We think we’re fitter. If we can get around them, work around into holes and get a couple of weak shoulders…it sounds very easy to do...”

It is Wednesday afternoon. Johnny Sexton walks into the converted changing room in the IRFU compound. Blue tracksuit, blue hoody, white trainers, there are eight cameras, five mics, 30 people and four bottles of energy drink on the table.

Of the thousands of words spoken about Sexton, former teammate Rob Kearney settled on a few when he was discussing the Irish captain’s broad sweep of influence in weeks like these, how Warren Gatland’s cold cut to leave him out of the 2021 Lions Tour weaponised his motivation.

“He is a cultural architect who has changed the mindset of so many payers, so many squads,” said Kearney. “He has impacted coaches. It’s not just what he does on the field, it’s the standards, the behaviours he drives the five days before the game.

“The Johnny I know holds grudges and not only does he hold them, holds them for possibly…ever. He creates a chip on his shoulder to drive himself. That’s where the burning desire comes from. If Ireland win [against Wales], I’d not be surprised if he does go up to Gatland and says thank you for not picking me. That’s the sort of thing he would do.”

[ Ireland vs France: ‘If we’re favourites, that doesn’t bother me’ - Sexton relishing upcoming clash ]

Sexton sits and impassively stares out at the rig of light, a dome shaped bin lid-sized lamp, as the Netflix crewman swings a sound boom around the room.

He grasps the value of beating France and its worth to both teams having signed up for two seasons with Parisian club Racing 92 in 2013. Despite dire IRFU warnings about playing abroad, Ireland couldn’t leave him out.

Sexton understands the French and the different threads to their emotional makeup. He also recognises his own. On the Wednesday of the last two Ireland games against France, he has had to pull out of the match.

“It feels like a huge game. It is a huge game. There’s no point in saying anything otherwise,” he acknowledges.

“You can’t just come in here and say ‘it’s just another game’ because it’s not. It’s one we’ve waited a long time for. It’s a huge game.”

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In France the mood is patience. There’s a willingness to sharpen the guillotine, but a reluctance to allow it fall after one match. Disappointing against Italy but a bonus point win, not defeat. There’s a stay on the order to overreact.

French sports paper L’Équipe was factual and not panicked. Like French captain Antoine Dupont it stated the obvious, a poor translation adding pathos.

“After Italy, the Blues are projecting towards Ireland, the first nation in the world,” said the paper. “If the Blues do not wish to fall into pessimism after the narrow victory in Italy, they recognise that it will be necessary to show another face in Ireland.”

Scrumhalf Dupont shows similar clarity and absence of sympathy for France doubling the 9.4 penalty count they usually have.

“We are going to analyse it,” said Dupont. “But we were not able to stop this contagion which took us from the start of the match…We were unable to rectify the situation in real time, so we will have to do it during the week.”

French coach Fabien Galthié knows exactly what he faces. He has been watching it all season and right through November.

“An offensive game, which is the signature of Leinster, of their captain Johnny Sexton,” he says. “When you watch Ireland play you are watching Leinster.”

[ Ireland vs France: Gibson-Park, Furlong and Healy out of consideration for crunch Six Nations match ]

His final visit to their base this week, Farrell sits unperturbed by the pillars that have been falling over the last two weeks. Furlong, Healy, Sheehan and his metronome Gibson-Park. Kilcoyne hinted that it’s not an unwelcome challenge. Multi-stranded Ireland will snap to.

“I think Faz likes that little bit of pressure, those situations where players drop out and you see how lads react,” said Kilcoyne.

He may be reading his coach smartly. There’s an enthusiasm in Farrell’s voice. Walking around his part of the city in Sandymount, he talks about sensing the tension of the winding-up process, the public embrace of this team’s enterprise and dependability to compete.

Also, the World Cup, a competition that has set off alarms in some players fearful of distractions that takes their minds outside of the present, is now a convenient foil.

Farrell talks of rolling with the punches and today’s shuffled team simulating what will happen in France in the autumn. He talks of his squad’s personality, the modern game and a team that always has moving parts.

“Your defence is your character,” he says.

Dublin is not ignoring the mood. Farrell is thriving on it, France are wary of it. A regional conflict in Aviva Stadium but with the rest of the rugby world looking on.