David Corkery on rugby: Hammering by the French will force Ireland into a tactical rethink

There were signs of fatigue for a while but we certainly didn’t expect a catastrophic implosion of this magnitude.

France may well be one of the best sides in the world, but so are Ireland. So where did this game all go disastrously wrong?

The final scoreline of 27-42 may seem like a significant enough margin but Ireland’s last two tries only came about because France had completely tuned out.

At that point of the game it looked as if France were participating in a game of touch rugby as 150kg front-row forwards were passing the ball about as if they were playing with their kids on a sun-soaked beach in the south of France.

Maybe there was a small bit of over-confidence on Ireland’s part. Or maybe they got caught up in all the emotions that developed around the news of Peter O’Mahony, Cian Healy, and Conor Murray’s retirement.

If you ever wanted physical proof of where rugby is going, Saturday evening offered the perfect example. The game was great to watch but so were the gladiators that entertained audiences during the Roman Empire.

Some of the collisions that take place on a rugby field now are like car crashes. So when France decided to name a seven-forward and one-back split on their bench, you just knew that their game plan was devised around wearing Ireland down and crushing them in the second half.

I have no trepidation with coaches picking whoever they want, but what I do have major concerns about is the size and power of the modern-day rugby player and the kind of injuries that they can inflict on another player.

BASIC PHYSICS

To even come close to competing at the Everest of this sport it is now no longer good enough to have players who are just fit and skilled enough to do their job.

Yes, there will always be one or two positions available for speedsters like Frances Louis Bielle-Biarrey, who helped himself to two tries, but unless you now have two complete sets of forwards who look like they have spent their entire lives in a gym, your ability to compete will very quickly fall foul to the principles of basic physics.

South Africa may have been the first side to introduce this tactic of almost completely changing their entire pack of forwards in the second half, but now France are doing it.

And it won’t be too long before the rest will have no choice but to follow suit. That’s if they want to stay competitive.

Last week, double World Cup winner Steven Kitshoff was left with little choice but to retire. The 33-year-old revealed in a subsequent interview that he was told by a specialist: “I was two millimetres away from catastrophe, from death”.

Kitshoff’s injury came about as the direct result of the power that is produced in a scrum and with players only getting bigger, stronger and becoming more and more ruthless by the lure of win bonuses, we can only expect to see cases like Kitshoff’s becoming a more regular occurrence.

The injury to James Lowe that manifested in the warm-up was a major blow to Ireland’s ambitions of winning this game.

Lowe, who has played a major role in helping Ireland over the last couple of years, put his back into spasm doing a simple mauling exercise and had to be replaced by Munster’s Calvin Nash.

This last-second change would have set Ireland back a bit, but when the world’s best player Antoine Dupont had to leave the field after 25 minutes with a serious knee injury, you could say that his departure was even more disruptive to the French.

This Irish squad will now not only have to cope with the physical damage inflicted by this loss, but there is also a massive mental hurdle that needs to be dealt with.

Gone are their hopes of winning a Grand Slam and their third championship in a row and while they have a Triple Crown to fall back on, this loss might just have them rethinking their entire strategy for their build-up to the next World Cup.

I have no idea where rugby is going or where it is going to end up, but what I can tell you is that I’m very happy to be watching from the sidelines now.