Andy Farrell insisted he had no worries about Ireland suffering a World Cup hangover during Friday’s Guinness Six Nations win over France.
After having their dreams of winning the Webb Ellis Cup narrowly dashed by defeat in the quarter-finals, both teams faced off for the blockbuster championship opener in Marseille.
Reigning Grand Slam champions Ireland responded strongly with a 38-17 bonus point success at the Stade Velodrome, giving them a good start in defending their title and also putting the memory of their heartbreaking last-eight loss to New Zealand in October behind them. It helped calm me down.
“We don’t have a hangover,” head coach Farrell said.
“We realized where we are now, where we need to go next, what we need to learn, and that’s it.
“The hangover is something to look forward to tomorrow. It’s only three months away. If it doesn’t go away by then, it’s a bad hangover.
“We always talk about past performances, and sometimes we go back three years and say things like, we learned this.
“Obviously we will learn big things from the All Blacks defeat, but this is not a hangover. It’s just the next step in how we progress as a team going forward. That’s my opinion. That’s how it should be.”
Tries from Jamison Gibson-Park, Tajig Beirne, Calvin Nash, Dan Sheehan and Ronan Kelleher stunned France and silenced the majority of the packed crowd at the Stade Velodrome.
Les Bleus barely responded to their overwhelming opposition, playing around 60 minutes of the game with 14 men after Paul Willemse was sent off in the sin bin for high tackles on Andrew Porter and Caelan Doris.
Despite Ireland’s biggest away win against France, new captain Peter O’Mahony, who replaced Johnny Sexton after the World Cup, has big room for improvement ahead of Round 2 against Italy. I believe that.
“We’ve been on the road for a long time and we’ve had a lot of great experiences and banked it, and we’ve had some tough experiences and banked it,” O’Mahony said.
“The aim is always to get better and it was a new step for the group.
“This is a big opportunity for us, but at the same time it’s just another game for us and we talked about how calm and collected we can be in such an environment.
“It was a great test for the group. There’s a lot to work on, but there were parts of the game that I felt were good performances.”