GERRY THORNLEYtalks to former Irish internationals about our poor record and the scale of the task facing Ireland at the Stade de France tonight

WHETHER Stade Colombes, Parc des Princes or latterly Stade de France, save for the very odd exception, nowhere carries such a grim sense of foreboding for Irish rugby teams as Paris. “La Ville-Lumière” is more like the city of darkness.

It is now a dozen years since Brian O’Driscoll marked his first appearance in the French capital – shirt billowing out of his skinny frame – with the hat-trick that announced him to the rugby world in a near fabled 27-25 win. Alas, it gets better with each passing year.

Go back further, and that win ended a run of 13 successive defeats spreading back to 1972, when tries by Johnny Moloney and Ray McLaughlin (Ireland’s very first four-pointers) helped Ireland to a 14-9 win.

Arguably the psychological damage of that Parc des Prince voodoo – cockerels strutting on to the pitch as Ireland restarted again and the viewers back home hid behind the settees – is still felt today. In 20 subsequent visits to the French capital, including a 2007 World Cup pool game, there have been 19 defeats and that’s excluding the defeat in Bordeaux last year.

For their part, the generation of ’72 were laying a 20-year, nine-loss bogey themselves dating back to 1952 after Jackie Kyle’s Grand Slammers of 1948 followed up their draw in 1950. Those post-war years must have been fun. However, in 30 visits to Paris since the latter 11-8 win in Stade Colombes, Ireland have won twice and lost 28. Yep. Two wins, no draws, and 28 defeats.

“Mental block,” says Fergus Slattery. Aside from being the foremost number seven on the planet in his heyday, the Lions’ openside was on the losing side in 1970 and the winning side in ’72, before returning there for the defeats of ’74, ’78, ’80, ’82 and ’84.

Never one inclined to mince his words, Slattery explains: “You’ve got to go over there with 15 guys lining up for the kick-off believing that you’re going to win. But we didn’t always have 15 guys believing that.

“The other thing about the French is that you have to beat them up, you have to get stuck into them,” he adds. “I know the game has changed, but the reality is still the same. They play on a home and away basis like everybody else, and when they play away from France they get beaten up. But when they play at home they beat people up. Tie that in with the belief and you’ve got a key element.”

That said, he looks back on the 8-0 defeat in Stade Colombes in ’70 along with the win there two years later, and maintains that Ireland were the better side.

In the ’78 and ’80 defeats, Slattery was a part of good Irish sides that lost by a point each time. “And in ’74, we were robbed. That’s a game we easily should have won,” he says in reference to a 9-6 defeat.

“I think we missed a penalty in front of the posts in the last five or ten minutes, but we were the better side in the game.”

Slattery maintains the 30,000-capacity Stade Colombes, the old Olympic stadium with a running track around the playing arena, was more akin to a cricket ground. By comparison, the 50,000 Parc des Princes was “much more atmospheric”. The Italians are now going through what the French went through.

“If we’d played internationals in Toulouse, there would have been 50,000 at a dedicated rugby ground. And you have to remember, the French were the whipping boys up until the late 50s.”

The 22-9 loss in 1982 denied a vintage Irish team the Grand Slam. Unfortunately, the itinerary had left Ireland idle in round four, meaning that by the time they went to Paris it had been fully four weeks since Ollie Campbell’s six penalties and a drop goal had completed the Triple Crown with a 21-12 win over Scotland, whereas France were facing a whitewash.

“With the momentum we had, that was the real killer, to have that break,” admits Slattery, who likens the rustiness to an opening weekend game, when Ireland were invariably under-cooked.

Willie Duggan was ruled out the night before the game, Ireland led 6-3 at half-time and were only trailing 16-12 late on. “It wasn’t that we were well beaten,” says Slattery. “We could have done it but it just didn’t happen.”

Philip Danaher was part of the teams that lost in Parc des Princes in ’88, (as a fullback), and then as a centre in ’90, ’92 and ’94. In those days, France were pretty hot. “They would have Sella, Blanco, Mesnel and Rodriguez at number eight. Those teams in that era had individuals that typify what French rugby really was.”

Recalling that ’88 defeat by 25-6, Danaher says: “There used to be two clocks at either end of the ground and I remember we conceded a try which I thought might have been after 30 or 32 minutes but when you got behind the sticks and you could see the clock at the far end you went: ‘oh ****, there’s only 10 minutes gone.”

“The cockerel was on the field and you got the sense that the crowd was on top of the pitch. There was a Thomond Park atmosphere to an extent. It was spring, they were bigger, and they had those individuals. We wouldn’t have had any inter-action with French rugby like today back then. That would have been France at its best, I would have thought.”

Danaher’s four visits there completed a run of seven treks to Parc des Princes without so much as a try. “You wouldn’t even dream of it,” he jokes. As the Irish try in the 45-10 defeat of 1996 was a penalty try, Freddie McLennan thus remains the only Irishman to have scored a try in 11 Irish sorties to Parc des Princes.

Highlighting the contrasting club games, Danaher says: “in those days, we would blow up with 20 minutes to go”.

So, were Irish teams beaten before they even boarded the Aer Lingus flight from Dublin Airport? “I think there would have been that, because when we went back there in ’98 with Gatty (Warren Gatland), our first match was in Paris, and we could have won that game.”

Gatland had taken over at short notice from Brian Ashton, with Danaher as assistant coach and Donal Lenihan as manager. Ireland were 16/1 outsiders and were +33 points with the bookies, back in the day when 33 was a lot of points.

But with the advent of professionalism, Danaher says; “We knew we could deal with the physicality of the game and that we could last 80 minutes. We were actually putting pressure on them at the end, which would never have happened previously.”

Two years later, Gatland (with Eddie O’Sullivan replacing Danaher as backs’ coach) took a rebuilt, more confident Irish side to Paris after making seven changes and giving five debuts in the preceding 44-22 win over Scotland.

“I think there was a good age and a good mentality within that team,’ says Anthony Foley. “There was a fearlessness that comes with inexperience and it was a brilliant place to play. There was a great atmosphere within the ground and Drico did a number on them, and Rog (Ronan O’Gara) and Humphs (David Humphreys) kept the scoreboard ticking.”

“We were hanging in there by our fingernails for long periods,” admits Foley, who nonetheless maintains Ireland deserved to win, even if it was all hands to the pump – the recovering, try-saving tackle by Denis Hickie to haul down the French hooker Marc del Maso springing to mind.

“He just didn’t give up on it and I think he got a few stitches for his troubles. Paddy Johns got sinbinned for a five-metre scrum and I had to go into the secondrow, but we managed to hold out and Humphs landed a match-winning penalty from outside the ten-metre line. It was that kind of game. Every metre counted. Everybody was called upon to do stuff that they probably wouldn’t have been called upon to do in other weeks.”

A dozen of the 18 players who had tasted that winning feeling in 2000 turned up under O’Sullivan two years later and suffered a record 44-5 defeat. “It can happen to you like that, says Foley. “It could have happened in 2000. If you watch the start of that game they were on fire, and if you miss a tackle or somebody daydreams for a second, doesn’t do their job around ruck time or drops a ball, they’re all over you.

“You cannot allow them any momentum or show them any weakness whatsoever and you need people to go above and beyond the call of duty.”

Shane Horgan missed out on Paris in 2000, after straining his knee ligaments in a club game in Dungannon, which was galling seeing as he scored four tries in the games over Scotland, Italy and Wales. Instead, he was part of the suffering in ’02, ’04, ’06 and ’07 (in the World Cup) as well as being an unused sub in ’08.

“They all kind of blur into one,” he says, except for the comeback in 2006, when Ireland recovered from a 36-3 deficit early in the second-half to have the French hanging on at 43-31 at the end. “We had a good gameplan and good players, but every time we were about to break them down, they just killed us on the counter-attack.”

Then there’s the opening salvos. “I was talking about this the other night, and the speed of the first 20 minutes in Paris. It’s like nowhere else in the world, for me. The first few times I played there I thought ‘these are supermen. They can not keep this up’. It’s partly due to the atmosphere in the stadium as well. But if you do hang in with them, they can start to doubt themselves.”

“I don’t remember any team in the world, save for maybe New Zealand, that are quite so ruthless at home for punishing errors,” says Horgan, citing last week’s win over Italy. Indeed, France scored four tries to nil with 40 per cent of the territory.

The one break from the biannual championship beating in Paris was the 2007 World Cup, though that didn’t provide much in the way of light relief, with their whole World Cup and years of work on the line.

“We were at a low ebb, but everyone I was close to really thought we could win that game.”

“But we were very leaden-footed, that’s what I remember most,” says Horgan. “They didn’t play particularly well but we were poor. And I think that’s why there was such a backlash. I could understand people looking at that and going: ‘jeez, are these lads even trying?’ But it was such a big deal for us to perform that day, and we never did.”

Even looking in from the outside, Slattery reckons the mental block must still be there, and hence is not optimistic about today. “Last Sunday, when people asked me, I said 55-45 in favour of Wales. I just thought Wales would have the edge, contrary to what a lot of people thought, and France definitely have the edge this Saturday. It’s not 55-45, it’s 65-35.”

“It still doesn’t mean you can’t win. Of course you can. But you’ve got to go out and do all those things. You’ve got to go out and hit them from the kick-off and knock them off their stride. If you don’t do that, they’ll just kill you in their own time.”