Ireland revenge mission falls flat amid flurry of squandered chances but England march on | Sarah Rendell

Ireland sent out mixed messages from their camp before their game with France on Saturday: was this a revenge mission for their Rugby World Cup quarter-final exit or not? The head coach, Scott Bemand, had denied it but the captain, Erin King, admitted the World Cup game had added some “venom” to the encounter and the full-back Stacey Flood said France should be “worried if I was them”.

The Irish team may have had the image of Axelle Berthoumieu biting Aoife Wafer, an action that was not caught during the quarter-final but the France back row was given a nine-game ban afterwards, for added motivation if any was needed. There was certainly no love lost between the teams, with the fixture full of tension, squabbles and huge hits.

But Ireland missed the chance to land a vengeful blow on their rivals and the opportunity slipped through their fingers with three disallowed first-half tries and a missed penalty. The visitors’ inability to put daylight between themselves and France on the scoreboard allowed the hosts to take the game away from them in the final 25 minutes.

The result will leave the team and fans with a similar feeling from that quarter-final: that they should and could have won the match. It has been nine years since they got the better of France and François Ratier’s team’s 10th consecutive win over them means they are unlikely to finish higher than third in this year’s Six Nations.

“The tough lesson is that when you get your chances you have to take your points,” said Bemand. “I’m incredibly proud of the effort. We know where we are heading and we just want to keep on getting better.

“You can see the girls have left everything out there and they don’t really know how to feel. This is a cauldron of fire and for 55 or 60 minutes we’ve handled it. What we have to do is go deeper in these games and see more impact when we come off the bench.”

The sold-out Stade Marcel-Michelin saw more than 17,000 fans playing their part and they were deafening not only when it came to the French tries but for their defensive efforts too. One example was a superb covering tackle by the wing Anaïs Grando to hold up Fiona Tuite over the line and the crowd went wild after the referee, Clara Munarini, confirmed it was not a try.

Grando has been an impressive player for France this Six Nations with four tries in three games. She will be one for future opponents to keep an eye on, particularly England with the French looking to end the Red Roses’ stranglehold on this competition. France have not won the Six Nations in eight years but they look best placed to disrupt England’s dominance, and they were the last to beat them in the tournament back in 2018.