Six Nations 2023 - Ireland v France Match Thread, Sat 11th Feb, KO 2:15PM - TV: RTÉ2, ITV, France2

Confirmation that it knackered them 😎

I don't want to give away too much but to deliver predictions as accurate as I do takes in depth analysis. After my trip to Italy, I will know how often Ange Capuozzo goes to the toilet. I have sources in many places, cameras seeing things they shouldn't see. All of this to provide you all with saucy tips.

Dupont holding him up on the line should be automatic benching.

Ah here. Dupont has thighs like tree trunks. Hansen is the archetypical winger built for speed. No contest there.

The real issue was that he had his hands free and nobody gave him the option to offload to them. There was certainly at least one player there to give that option and didn't.

I think he fussed POM over that afterwards. POM went to the left, when he could've stayed closer to the touchline for a pop pass

Thanks, couldn't remember who it was. I think POM was trying to help get the ball to ground for the recycle, but missed the opportunity to take the offload and get the score. Small margins again really.

It’s hard to comment on those as you don’t know who is talking to who and whether there are delays getting messaging on to Barnes, and if so where those delays are. At the end of the day though he didn’t play on. He should have been off sooner but while it did take a little longer than it should have we got the right result.

Slightly different view here.

For as long as I have watched (A long time!) Ireland could on their day beat the best or at least lose heroically and then frustratingly not perform against lower ranked opposition the next day out.

What we seem to have now is consistency and a legitimate expectation that we will perform across all games. Farrell and his team have engineered strenght in depth and it is paying dividends.

I can't wait to see where that brings us at a world cup.

P.S. Nervous posting this...Italy are gonna beat us aren't they! 😣

I don't understand why team management and medics can't just make a call themselves and say....."let's just get it checked".

Regarding the red card itself, I think this idea of mitigation and interpretation has led to a s**tshow. I am involved in minis rugby. The kids know that tackles muse be below the waist - it's a simple instruction and we have to work hard to instill that into children. My son comes home, watches a game and he assumes a high tackle should be a red card. We now have a situation where some high tackles which are dangerous and injure players are red cards and some are yellow. How is that going to benefit the game in the long run?

Everyone in the game at elite level (unions, management, players, medics, RW etc) needs to do better on this.

Medical teams need to stand up.

I think it would be a positive in dragging the referees attention that an issue is serious.

Barnes thought Herring was fine which helped him with his bullshit reasoning that the tackle was a low degree on danger.

i think the medical team hooking Herring would have made the low degree of danger argument disappear.

It'll make a big difference to Ireland imo, he's been one of our best players for the past 12-18 months. And there's a big dropoff between the big 3 and everyone else in the second row so obviously impacts the bench.

Well there isn’t consistency amongst referees. We have seen other referrees view similar situations differently. The protocols were used to explain his decision. It does not mean the decision was correct. Barnes used contact with the chest as mitigation and mentioned whiplash from that. That was clearly not the case. He said there wasn’t a high degree of danger. Clearly that wasn’t the case.