Andy Farrell pinpoints what went wrong for Ireland in Paris

The Ireland head coach felt his players went 'into their shells' during the 35-27 Six Nations loss to France

Ireland head coach Andy Farrell: 'At half-time the chat was about belief, it was a little bit off'

Ireland head coach Andy Farrell sensed a lack of belief in his team as they went down to a troubling defeat in Paris.

The visitors began the game knowing that a six-point win, including just one try, would give them the title ahead of England after the latter's win in Rome against Italy but too many basic errors saw them come up well short of their target.

Farrell, speaking to Virgin TV afterwards, began his post-mortem by mentioning how narrow his team got at times and the effect the wet conditions had on the ball but he also suggested that they had gone ”into our shells a little bit” in the first-half in particular.

It was a peculiar line of thought given Ireland had played some decent ball in that period.

It was after the break when the wheels really came off with a succession of mistakes undermining their efforts to claw back a 14-10 deficit.

"I thought we didn't quite believe that we had to go and win the game, to take the game for France,” said Farrell after the end of a delayed Six Nations campaign in which his side had to settle for a third place finish in the table.

That belief issue was one he returned to in the main press conference. It was, he added, “a bit off”.

Why this should be is another thing. Maybe it is a legacy of the dreadful year the squad experienced in 2019 when their form utterly deserted them.

There were certainly shades of that here, especially so in a second-half when various aspects of their game went to pot.

Simple errors that crept in at the back end of the Joe Schmidt era resurfaced here, even if the rain and the grease was a factor.

It's over 18 months since Schmidt used the word "broken" to describe his players after England had claimed a dominant win in a Six Nations opener and the fact is at Ireland have yet to fix whatever it is that is troubling them since.

A side that could do so little wrong for so long is no struggling to do enough of anything right.

“There were enough opportunities there for us to win two games,” said Farrell.

We certainly weren’t clinical enough with the opportunities that we had and if you don’t take your chances in big games like this then you’ll come unstuck eventually.

“It’s an obviously thing to say but we’d enough entries into the French 22 and didn’t come away with points. It’s as simple as that really. At half-time the chat was about belief, it was a little bit off and we shipped a score just after half-time, it wasn’t great.

“We killed our own momentum at times and then that stopped the fluidity of things. The errors that we made were across the board, it wasn’t just one area but being clinical in the last third of the pitch was the main point.”

Momentum was with the French at the interval, not just because they held a lead despite having enjoyed so little possession and territory, but because Ireland had failed to claim a try just before the whistle having kicked the corner when a simple three points was on offer.

It wasn't the first time that line of thinking was used.

"Oh well, look, there's always decisions to be made and we've made plenty of those decisions in the past and we've won games because of them,” said Farrell.

"I back the players to understand the feel and flow of the game and obviously we'd been down there and scored a try from our pick and go in that first-half and obviously with the momentum at the end of that first-half we thought we could get another seven points.

So I back the players to be able to make those calls.