FRANCE’S BONUS-POINT try was the perfect example of just how brilliant a return they got from their kicking game in Paris.

And it was an illustration of how little return Ireland got from theirs.

The sequence begins with Ireland getting a scrappy lineout win near the halfway line. Denied a strong set-piece platform, they go to the plan that was so predominant all night at Stade de France.

Jamison Gibson-Park hangs up a box kick, but France win the contest underneath it.

Jacob Stockdale is the man who chases and he gets a one-on-one against Théo Attissogbe, whose aerial ability helped earn him selection.

Attissogbe wins this contest in part because he gets his lead right knee up into Stockdale, connecting with the Irish wing’s left thigh, unbalancing Stockdale, while allowing Attissogbe to win the space.

The French wing also gets his elbows up high and over Stockdale’s arms. 

The combined effect is that while Attiosgbe doesn’t actually claim the ball, it comes down on France’s side.

The ‘scraps’ coming down from the contest are claimed by Oscar Jégou [red below], who works hard from his starting position close to the box kick to sprint downfield.

You make your own luck when it comes to winning scraps.

Having defused the Irish bomb, France now put together one of their own.

Straight off Jégou’s carry, Antoine Dupont hangs up the contestable box kick and Attissogbe chases.

Again, Attissogbe wins the ball for France over Stockdale.

The timing of Attissogbe’s arrival to contest is the key because Dupont’s box kick is relatively short. 

If Attissogbe chases flat out, he’ll end up too far underneath the ball, meaning he has to jump straight up to contest it, which in turn means he will get less vertical height.

Watch again below as Attissogbe slows his chase with very short steps, before accelerating aggressively as he lengthens his stride in the last three steps, giving him elastic power off the ground as he jumps up through the landing point to get maximum height.

Ireland’s Stockdale ends up jumping up from further underneath the ball.

The Irish wing only gets one long stride in which to generate his power.

It’s enough to ensure that Attisogbe gets an inch above Stockdale with his right arm, which he’s using the bat the ball backwards.

Stockdale is attempting to catch the ball two-handed overhead, which is difficult to achieve in this kind of contested situation against someone looking to bat the ball.

France have again positoned themselves well around the contest for the scraps.

The French immediately look to shift the ball wide left to speedster Louis Bielle-Biarrey, but Ireland centre Garry Ringrose shoots up to prevent Matthieu Jalibert from finding his Bordeaux team-mate.

Yet straight from that Jalibert carry, France go to their kicking game again as Dupont dinks a different type of kick over Ireland.

This time, Dupont and fullback Thomas Ramos identify the opportunity short in behind the Irish frontline defence, with their two backfield defenders [pink below] set up deep.

This space is often there against many teams – Ireland themselves have used similar kicks on several occasions in the past – but it’s difficult to exploit because the kicker needs to be extremely accurate and the chaser has to be very quick. 

If it goes wrong, it could leave the kicking team exposed on counter-attack.

But Dupont nails his kick and Ramos has great speed, meaning he just beats retreating Ireland right wing Tommy O’Brien to the ball. 

With O’Brien [yellow below] so near to him and Jamie Osborne [pink] closing up from the backfield, Ramos knows he will be hammered if he goes to catch the ball.

So in rather characteristic fashion, he fires up his left boot to nudge it on, knowing that Bielle-Biarrey is outside.

Ramos is a predominantly right-footed kicker but his use of the left works wonders here.

Does he definitely mean to hit the ball with the outside of his left boot, causing it to arc so perfectly out towards Bielle-Biarrey? 

We don’t know for absolute certain but Ramos has to be given the benefit of the doubt because of his history with touches like this one. He definitely knows that his left wing is outside him, so it’s certainly not a fluke.

This was a recent touch of his to help set up a Toulouse try against La Rochelle.

While Ramos is a disciplined, tactically astute fullback, he is also one of several French players who possess the kind of x-factor and creativity that Ireland don’t seem to have.

In this instance against Ireland, Bielle-Biarrey scampers away for his second try and with France 29-0 ahead with half an hour left, the game is over as a contest barring a miracle Irish comeback.

The try starts with Ireland failing to win back a contestable kick, which was one of the big stories on a wet night in Paris.

The game was only 57 seconds old when Gibson-Park launched the first of them from midfield on second phase of lineout attack, setting a tone for the Irish tactics.

Ireland were still going contestable in the second half as they chased the game, even on first phase from consecutive lineouts 10 metres inside the French half.

The kick from Prendergast above is a towering one, but it’s just too long to allow Ringrose to get off the ground and contest the ball.

Ringrose stretches out in a bid to tap it down to himself, but Ramos is cool under pressure and stays on the ground as he calls the mark.

Simply put, all the contestable kicking didn’t work because Ireland couldn’t get the ball back. The figures in that regard are stark.

Ireland kicked the ball 39 times on Thursday night but retained just 4 of them, according to Opta’s data.

Now, all of those 39 kicks weren’t contestable, but a retention rate of just 10% is very low.

France also kicked 39 times on the night but they retained 9 of their kicks for a 23% retention rate.

Combine France’s ability to retain their kicks with Ireland’s inability to do the same – meaning France got the ball – and it underlines the eyeball impression of les Bleus dominating the kicking and aerial battles on Thursday. 

Ireland’s inability to win the aerial contests surely played into Farrell’s sense that his team “lacked intent” in the opening half of the game. Wing pair Stockdale and Tommy O’Brien, the key aerial contesters, got no change out of Attisogbe, Bielle-Biarrey, and co.

Remarkably, Ireland won just a single aerial contest in the opening 50 minutes at Stade de France. So this was a big factor in Ireland’s miserable defeat.

They did get a few successes later in the game, with Stockdale winning back a Gibson-Park box kick in the lead-up to their second try through Michael Milne, but it was too little, too late.

The fact that Ireland kicked the ball in play so many times on Thursday will have left many supporters and pundits alarmed, although it’s not completely new.

Indeed, as recently as the Australia game in November, Ireland kicked 45 times. Last summer against Georgia, there were 44 kicks in play.

The common factor between those two games and Thursday night’s one in Paris was the rain.

The difference between those two and the defeat to France is that Ireland had very little success in winning back kicks or forcing the French into uncomfortable positions in Paris.

The Australia game was a brilliant example of Ireland using their kicking to dominate a game, but it’s worth stressing just how much variety there was to the kicking from Farrell’s side in that clash with the Wallabies.

They did hang up lots of contestables, with fullback Mack Hansen producing some big wins, but there were also grubber kicks, chips, cross kicks, 50:22 efforts and a few spirals.

Ireland did initially appear set to bring more variety against the French, as Prendergast fired a cross kick into space just after receiving a kick from les Bleus.

This was likely a planned tactic from Ireland, who may have spotted France getting narrow on kick chase in previous games.

We can see centre Stuart McCloskey communicating the space to Prendergast even as the out-half calibrates his kick.

Right wing O’Brien follows Prendergast’s cross kick with a chip over the head of Ramos, but the French fullback turns and shows his pace to win the race back to the ball.

Ireland also had an early 50:22 through fullback Jamie Osborne, whose powerful left boot found space behind Nicolas Depoortère deep in the backfield.

But after that early show of variety in their kicking game, Ireland became one-dimensional in repeatedly hanging contestable kicks over the French, even though they weren’t getting success.

The lasting impression of Gibson-Park launching box kicks into the Parisian sky is backed up by his having been Ireland’s leading kicker in play with 16.

France did more damage with a varied approach to kicking, helping to put them into good positions to attack from, as for the opening try of the night through Bielle-Biarrey.

Across 2025, Ireland averaged 31 kicks in play per game, with England the only top-tier nation who kicked more, with just under 36 kicks per game on average.

Ireland retained 20.5% of their kicks across all Tests last year, which was second only to the Springboks, who retained a whopping 27.7% of all their kicks in play. 

So Ireland have often managed to do a good job at winning their kicks back in the past, but they came up well short in that regard against the French.