I hope you might get some mileage out of this if you put it up by the watercooler in your London office Colm.

Joking aside, what an afternoon Saturday was. In Cardiff, if it wasn't for Rob Sidoli hastily putting the ball into touch to give the French the platform for their defining try it could have been better. Aside from that Wales were excellent against France and again showed this French team look far from bankers when you put it up to them.

Gavin Henson only a matter of months ago had astoundingly questioned the integrity of some people he shares the Millenium Stadium dressing room with over their nationality. His words have come back to haunt him sooner than I had hoped. Haldane Luscombe in particular was outstanding on the burst for the Welsh. He really stuck it to Henson by showing unwavering leadership to his adopted country while Henson has been largely anonymous for The Valleys since his petulant Lions debacle.

With The Championship almost in their back pocket Les Bleus gathered round the Twickenham tethered monitors in the intestines of the Cardiff Bowl to try to will the corks out of the magnums.

I made a schoolboy error in not committing the live game to videotape, however UKTV G2 came to the rescue today with their BBC commentated extended highlights which I did immortalise. I've managed to tear myself away from the rewind button long enough to get to the blog.

Last week in the wake of the dogged dispatching of the Scots Neil Francis wrote in the Tribune:

Scotland are the equivalent of flat-pack furniture. All Ireland needed yesterday was a step-by-step guide and to apply themselves and they should have taken this Ikean rugby side to pieces. Disassembly.

...

Ireland did perform, did engineer a good start and upped their intensity but played the conditions wrong.

They will need an IT specialist for next week. England have far better technology.

If this England team are what Francis calls high tech then he can slap my knee and call me Susan. Sure, England have a flank of muscle-bound cruise missles outside their fly half (whichever incomplete, glass-physique or overweight player is flavour of the month there). However these aren't of the smart bomb variety and seem to be no more sophisticated than a wrecking ball. The ultimate indictment of this English team is the amount of go forward their eight provided in the second half yesterday that resulted in next to zero finished product.

I've eulogised Shaggy since his performances last year out of position for Ireland in the Six Nations. Thankfully this season a dearth of injuries has permitted the Ireland wing to twinkle in his native role. If St. Patrick himself had that ball cemented to the top of his staff he couldn't have placed it better in the shadow of the corner flag. The drama of the moment makes it all the more difficult to remember the glorious triple-skip pass Stringer arrowed out the blind side to put Horgan in. Or before that, the explosion of O'Driscoll down the wing (his leg and arm speed in full flight has to be the most breathtaking spectacle in Irish Sport today), or before that the composure of O'Gara to chip over the top in the 78th minute inside his own 22.

Things are looking good for Ireland now in the build on the road to France '07. I'm glad to see some writers having to eat their column inches from the past few months where they called for O'Sullivan to go. It was an opportunistic campaign by some incredibly short-sighted sports journalists.

O'Sullivan was obviously profoundly struck by the way the game has moved on during his time with The Lions last summer. He came back a changed man. For his entire tenure he had instructed his team to play structured, set-piece, kick-the-leather-off-the-ball rugby with the odd very rehearsed flourish of attractive looking rugby off an attacking line-out.

In autumn (without the personel required) he completely threw away the hymn sheet and sent the team out to play with the ball always in hand, to a fault. To a certain extent that has carried through to the Six Nations. He is trying to develop Ireland's game in advance of the World Cup and if that means trying to play with the ball in hand more than the game dictates we should, so be it in the pursuit of learning the new creed. Gradually since those games in the autumn we are bringing more balance with each game and once the players are comfortable with both an O'Gara directed game and a wider one, then they will have the ability to use whichever tools suit the situation on the fly. Until then, the coach is validly in my opinion pushing the players to stick with the wide game to a fault, until they have learned it as a cohesive unit. Another season of Chieka executing the Aussie revolution at Leinster will bear more fruit for them and Ireland and bolster the backs further.

It was comforting to see O'Driscoll yesterday mention that the day's work was only a stepping stone to greater things. Today, bruised, battered and probably hungover, Paul O'Connell is already salivating at the summer tour which takes in two tests against the All Blacks before one against the Aussies. The game against France at home next season (hopefully in Croke Park) must now be in the back of the squad's mind as the next stone to put best foot forward on in the march to the '07 World Cup.

The most dissappointing part of the weekend was the England camp's reaction to the match and the trotting out of the 'Luck of the Irish' slight. O'Sullivan validly pointed out the abberation on the official's part of marching Easterby to the sin bin when Dawson cynically and purposely ran into him to implicate him in impeding from a tap. The unsporting reaction is maybe a measure of how much the bacon slicer is stinging Robinson. One of the most active rugby forums on the web is BBC's Scrum V website and on the forums there it was refreshing to see most English supporters were gracious in defeat and acknowledged Ireland's deserved win, along with most English pundits.

The front of the Shane Horgan's shirt is about right, Permanent Try Scoring Brilliance.