L'instant de verite beckons
Donncha O'Callaghan fires a pass during training in Paris last night
Paris on a war footing is a city engulfed by ghosts.
Here in Montparnasse, on the intersection with Boulevard St Michel, stands a bronze statue of Napoleon's favourite general, Marshal Ney. Across the cobbles, above a restaurant awning, is a giant poster of some of Bernard Laporte's most celebrated foot soldiers.
There is no accident or awkwardness to this marriage of history and sport. For tonight, the French rugby team -- quite literally -- takes to the trenches in St Denis.
As former international, Thomas Castaignede, observed yesterday: "It will be like a tsunami in French rugby if we lose!"
You can imagine the weight of fear pressing down on a whole nation here.
This tournament still has a month to run and, from Place Pablo Picasso all the way north to the Luxembourg Quarter, Paris is draped in World Cup bunting.
Lose and the unthinkable becomes reality -- France will find itself over-dressed for someone else's party.
This, then, is what they call l'instant de verite, the moment of truth. And it may explain the extraordinary preamble.
The sense of a build-up that has sailed from the gentle harbour of routine, Gallic disdain to the open sea of vicious character assassination.
Paris, at the best of times, can be overwhelming with its nonchalance. beauty and egalitarian pout. It isn't unusual to be Irish in this city and feel about as refined as a cockroach skidding across marble tiles.
Calm
Yesterday, Eddie O'Sullivan and Brian O'Driscoll came face to face with a country resolutely shedding calm. And it wasn't their own.
Down in the amphitheatre of the Sofitel in Port de Sevre, they spoke -- at times -- in euphemism and generality, if only because the laws of libel at home are more penal than would appear to be the case in France. Yesterday's l'Equipe article on O'Sullivan was, in itself, breathtaking both in language and tenor.
Yet coming, as it did, just a day after a piece impugning the character of a key Irish player, it did bear a murmur of editorial strategy.
Two Irish players could be seen scalding the relevant journalist before yesterday's media conference and, if the words of O'Sullivan and O'Driscoll are to be believed, the l'Equipe articles have now tightened the bonds in a supposedly beleaguered Irish party.
As the captain observed: "We will put that into the pot, we don't forget easily. This is a slur on a guy's personality and private life. It's nothing to do with what he does as a rugby player. If you were a cynic, you could say it was to try to knock things up in the build-up to the game, to try to throw something else into the fire, create sparks and unsettle us.
"But we are a bigger team, and we won't allow something as stupid and unfounded as that to disrupt us."
Then again, an alternatively cynical view might be that, given their traditional propensity for mangling Irish rugby teams in Paris, the French are hardly in need of extra-curricular assistance.
France, after all, have lost just once on home soil to Ireland in 35 years. It isn't, ordinarily, in their DNA to worry. They won this year's Six Nations, despite Laporte's policy of experimenting for the duration. Maybe, most cuttingly, they cackled in the eye of history, blithely picking our pockets on that biggest of big days in Croke Park.
In other words, Laporte's France have a name for beating Ireland habitually, monotonously, pitilessly.
Yet, this game bubbles with unique stress for the host nation. You could see it yesterday in the vaguely manic urgency that book-ended the media conference.
The cameramen following O'Sullivan onto the dais only to be hunted back down by an IRFU official. The photographers, like contortionists on the carpet below, bending every muscle to get the defining snap.
Through most of it, O'Sullivan and O'Driscoll fronted up with practiced solemnity. Briefly, a private thought did seem to sail into the captain's consciousness and, eyes never lifting from the table, he grinned mysteriously.
But neither man looked especially haunted. O'Driscoll sipped sporadically from a bottle. O'Sullivan played with metaphors. The media, generally, twittered.
Uniquely, O'Sullivan even took to lauding "the integrity" of an Irish press corps that had, as he put it, rejected the temptation to "jump on the bandwagon". Given the normal dynamic of relations between the Irish coach and certain journalists, that amounted to one of the more remarkable entente cordial's of recent Irish rugby history.
Yet, in one sense, perhaps the l'Equipe stories offered welcome diversion from Ireland's plunging form-line and the sense of a team now, somehow, running on empty.
The last compelling Irish performance was, probably, the routing of England in Croke Park. Strip that from the Six Nations rap-sheet and you are left with a loss to France, a nervy defeat of Wales in Cardiff, a positively neurotic one point escape against Scotland in Edinburgh and the final, high-kicking cabaret against Italy in Rome.
Then, an admittedly under-strength Ireland lost two Tests in Argentina before we slipped into the fraught business of World Cup warm-ups and, laterally, the even more fraught business of rucking down with World Cup minnows.
Six months since last shooting the lights out, this Ireland team is now -- effectively -- under suspicion.
Are they emotionally sated? Over-trained perhaps? Or, maybe, just lacking the tactical maturity to blossom on the big stage?
Knowledge
O'Sullivan's view is that little mysteries can befall a team on unfamiliar terrain. That Ireland, at least, are accustomed to Paris, to the French, to the soaring Stade. In other words, that they know what is coming tonight. He believes that knowledge is security here.
We will have to wait and see.
What remains undeniable is that he is, statistically, the best coach Ireland has had and -- maybe -- six of his players would have a chance of getting on a best-ever Irish team. And that's not a bad hand to carry to the table at a time of flux.
It might explain the French edginess too, the sense of local hearts thumping with uncommon dread.
But, tonight, Ireland must do something that most of rugby believes to be beyond them. They must blow this tournament asunder. So far, O'Sullivan's men have sign-posted nothing in terms of a capacity to stage that uprising.
Worse, everywhere they look, the Paris streets are ablaze with flamboyant reminders of why Laporte and France daren't fail tonight. Little conceits of pride and hope entangled. For one team, the guillotine awaits now.
L'instant de verite is at hand.
