BY 4.45PM ON Sunday, the Millennium Stadium should be a heaving cauldron of noise.
Capacity crowd. Roof closed. Anthems sung. Ireland’s encounter with France promises to be a spectacular occasion.
If Ireland were flat against Italy, they should have the opposite problem against the French. Keeping cool heads and focusing on their roles will be paramount — it’s a point not lost on Eoin Reddan, one of the elder statesmen of this squad.
“We’re all in no doubt about what it means to everyone back home,” said the Leinster scrum-half.
“The intensity and physicality that will be evident on Sunday will be different, I think everyone knows that.
“It’s hard to explain why that happens in games like this but it does happen, so you try to treat it like any other game but the emotion builds and your job is to control it and make sure that it’s there but that it doesn’t go overboard.
“We have to make sure we know our roles and produce under pressure at the weekend.”
Sunday’s clash is a tournament-defining game for Joe Schmidt’s side. A third consecutive victory over Les Bleus will secure a quarter-final meeting with Argentina, which is by no means an easy draw. But, with the All Blacks awaiting the runners-up of Pool D, a meeting with the Pumas would certainly be the lesser of two evils.
And Reddan, who played in the 25-3 defeat by France in Paris during the 2007 World Cup, is primed for Sunday’s seismic battle.
“I suppose because it’s the here and now, it’s the biggest. It’s huge,” added the Limerick native.
“From an opportunity point of view it’s a chance for this squad to go out and deliver hopefully a game that will give us great confidence to go on to better things.
“But it’s hard, if I tell you this week is the biggest game of our lives, you might be sick of hearing that off me in a few weeks, all going well.
“If I step out of it for a minute, I obviously realise that for the people at home and the expectation that’s building and the work that has been put in, it’s a massive, massive game for us and it would really be up there.
“But I tend not really to do that much, to step out and think about it too much, because we really have one training session left between now and the match and worrying if I can pass the ball to the guy there [gestures to his right] is probably a more productive thing for me to do, so that’s what I’m going to do.”
“But we know what it means to everyone at home, we know how much it means to each other in the group and at the same time we know all the little details we have to deliver on and that’s what we’re trying to do.”
