Ireland look to Joey Carbery to step up in finely poised match with France

You could hear this match between Ireland and France coming way back in the autumn. The anticipation has been building like a drum fill since the two teams beat New Zealand on back-to-back Saturdays last November.

Right now, the world rankings will tell you that Ireland are the best team in Europe. The French, who were, after all, the last team to beat Ireland when they won 15-13 in Dublin last year, believe differently. They are playing to settle that, the shot at the grand slam, and something more, too. The winner will step forward full of confidence that they can beat the best teams in the biggest games, with the ringing conviction that they are the top team.

The loser will have to live with the knowledge that they came up short when it counted most, and deal with the doubt that follows a step backwards. At the start of the week, you could have made a case that the Irish were just about favourites, even though they are going away from home. They had played pitilessly well against Wales last Saturday, while France had had a harder time getting past Italy a day later.

And then the news broke that Johnny Sexton had strained a hamstring and would miss this game. In a match as finely poised as this, that was enough, all of a sudden, to tilt the balance back the other way. “That’s sport,” said Ireland’s head coach, Andy Farrell.

His team had trained for this, rehearsed it in practice, swapping Sexton and his replacement Joey Carbery in and out for the last three weeks. The game’s never just about one man, Farrell said, and he’s right. His Ireland team have grown over the last year, winning nine games on the bounce, and don’t depend on Sexton like they used to. But it’s true, too, that some players are easier to do without