Foul Play: Nothing's gonna stop us now!

The Six Nations is underway and we’ve got the ball rolling with a perfectly efficient, if wholly unexciting, 28-6 stroll against a typically plodding Scotland. And all the portents are encouraging – no clearly outstanding team in the championship, a schedule which leaves the toughest tasks for last, a new coach whose credentials as a serial winner are beyond dispute, and a team with plenty to prove after a pretty shocking 2013 campaign.

I was away in sunny California when we played the All Blacks in November, so I didn’t see that one and can’t pass comment, though I vividly recall dreaming that we were beating them 21-0, before waking up at 9am Pacific time to discover that we’d led 19-0 and then lost, which frightens me a little. It should go without saying that any team who can build a lead like that against the Kiwis has a lot going for it, but it also needs pointing out that, if inconsistency can be a constant, we lead the rugby world in that area, with a pattern well established (stretching back to the turn of the decade) whereby every impressive display is swiftly followed up with a crushing letdown, and vice versa.

The post-mortem to the Scots encounter need not detain us for long; there isn’t a great deal of subtext to deconstruct. In a profoundly dreary game, the Scots – a physically imposing team of commendable honesty and drastically limited subtlety – made life awkward for long stretches but singularly failed to pose any attacking questions that weren’t signposted well in advance, before gradually finding themselves forcing it as the game began to get further and further away from them on the scoreboard. There were few fireworks to excite the fans, but any 22-point victory in any Six Nations game is a job very well done.

By contrast, no-one can really know what to expect from the imminent Welsh encounter. The teams’ meeting in Cardiff on opening day last year offers plenty of cause to be cheerful: Ireland furiously roared into a 30-3 lead which proved enough of a safety-net to cushion the blow of a fairly dramatic late meltdown. Wales, being Wales, turned around, won all the rest of their games and claimed the title; we proceeded to slump to fifth place as the season collapsed in an unsightly heap of injuries, errors and bungled decisions, eventually leading to the exit of Declan Kidney, very possibly the least quotable coach in the history of sport, causing every journalist in Ireland to weep a million tears.

Joe Schmidt, as I’ve stated here before, is almost over-qualified for the job, so vastly impressive was his three-year stewardship of Leinster. The prospect of him locking horns with Warren Gatland, a man who doesn’t bother to conceal his hatred of the IRFU, is irresistible on several levels. There is unresolved bad blood from the Lions tour of last year, when Brian O’Driscoll’s more rabid supporters were convinced that Gatland’s dropping of the great man for the third Test was motivated in part by personal antipathy (it must be pointed out that there were valid rugby arguments in favour of shuffling the pack, and the team went on to win resoundingly).

Further down the line, trips to Paris and London are never exactly easy, but neither should be approached with undue terror. The Anglo-French confrontation in Paris on opening day was a stunningly enjoyable affair, wherein England replicated the pattern of their recent loss to the All Blacks: sleep through the early exchanges, fall into an alarmingly large hole on the scoreboard, mount a positively heroic comeback, then freeze with the finishing line in sight and very narrowly lose the match.

On many levels, England were immense on Saturday, showing phenomenal reserves of guts and resolve. For a period in the second half, every stereotype about yeoman English true grit and poncey Gallic flakiness was being played out with a vengeance, with Les Bleus displaying the spirit of 1940, appearing to wuss out and wave the white flag when the going got tough. And yet, England still lost, the ridiculously mercurial French summoning just enough magic to pull it out of the fire.

Obviously every match must be looked at in its entirety, and France didn’t establish a 16-3 lead by accident. They remain more adept than anyone in Europe at inflicting large amounts of scoring damage in furious short bursts, and as we’ve found out again and again down the years, a game in Paris can get away from you very, very quickly if you give them half a sniff. But player-for-player, the merits of the Irish as repeatedly demonstrated by all three of our heavyweight provinces at Heineken Cup level speak for themselves. We are perfectly capable of beating anybody, and I mean anybody.

In what will most likely be a four-way battle, Ireland seem to have been a little undervalued at an ante-post 5/1 for the title, and Foul Play didn’t hesitate to invest. Already, the price has been shortened to 3/1. There may be great days on the way...