Ciara Griffin says earlier French class will count for nothing

Ciara Griffin says Ireland’s Six Nations victory over France earlier this year will mean nothing ahead of Thursday’s World Cup showdown at UCD.

Tom Tierney’s side must beat the French to reach the semi-final stage of the tournament, but come into the game off the back of two lukewarm performances against Australia (19-17) and Japan (24-14).

The hosts were expected to defeat both easily, but made hard work of the opening game against a physically superior Australian team, and needed all of their fighting spirit to come from behind against a Japan side that looked a class above in the first half but ultimately couldn’t hold out against Ireland’s fitness.

At the same time, France have been impressive winners against the same opposition, hammering Japan by 72-14 and following that up with a 48-point whitewash of the Wallaroos.

Ireland’s shock 13-10 win over France in Donnybrook in February may be a good result to have in the memory banks, but it’s unlikely to count for much on Thursday night.

“That win was a massive boost for us, but that’s the Six Nations, this a totally different tournament,” Griffin said.

“It’s up to us now to regroup, work on our accuracy, fix our mistakes and go hard at the French. We prepare for every game the same way, we prepared for Australia the same, Japan the same, and we won’t do anything differently for France. They’re very strong, they’ve a good pack, they’re well able to ship it wide, so it’s up to us to have good line speed, and just be physical.”

In the post-match press conference Tierney spoke in cliches so much that at one point he said ‘you know, all the buzzwords’, when explaining what Ireland must do better to beat France.

The reality was that so much went wrong on Sunday it would be a whole lot easier to say what went right. But Griffin, who has been one of the more impressive performers in the Ireland squad, refused to be too downbeat after two wins from two.

“There are lots of things to work on, but we won’t panic just yet,” Griffin said. “We’re realistic, we had a lot of handling errors, unforced errors too, which is something we didn’t want to happen, but we’ve spoken about it and we want to rectify it. Japan had really good line speed, and maybe we should have kept our depth a bit more as well. That’s sport. We’ve a lot to work on, but we won’t panic.”

No panic, but there’ll be plenty of straight talking, just as there was at half-time with Japan leading by 14-0.

But Griffin says this squad is one built on strong foundations, as shown by their habit of fighting back from a losing position.

“One of the things about this team is we’re a massive collective unit, we’re very close together, we’re like another family,” Griffin said. “We’re very good at talking to one another and helping each other out. We’ll help one another with analysis, anything we can improve on.

“If it happens to one person it happens to all of us, we don’t see it as a single issue. It is frustrating when the ball doesn’t go to hand, but it’s up to us to calm down, to cool the head, regroup and work on it. You could see that happened in the second half [against Japan].”