O'Sullivan's trench warriors stick to grand design

Grand Slam, Grand Slam, Grand Slam. These were the only words you could hear as Lansdowne Road emptied after this most gritty of Six Nations victories yesterday.

The adverts for Ireland's favourite tipple that seem to adorn every wall in the capital exhorted the fans to "Believe", but after 80 minutes that enthralled rather than excited there were not many who needed any encouragement to do just that. The day trip to Wales in a fortnight should be little more than a leg-stretcher to what now must rank alongside Ireland's finest, and then it will come down to the Slam decider against England on 30 March. If that doesn't set the blood boiling then you are either not Irish, or reading the wrong section of this newspaper.

Yesterday, however, was definitely one for the partisan, as the neutral would have been hard pressed to find much entertainment as the infamous Lansdowne wind made errors the main order of the day. As the Ireland coach, Eddie O'Sullivan, put it: "That was a real day in the trenches" and there was never much pretty to see in there."

There were, of course, always the travails of Raphael Ibañez to marvel at; the French hooker dropping more balls on a Saturday than your average Lottery machine. In the first half the damned thing slipped from Ibañez's hands at least four times – the first when his huge frame was perched over the try line in the opening minutes – and there were a couple more thrown away for good measure in the second half. You couldn't help thinking that in certain French circles the knock-on effect will now forever be known as the Ibañez effect, and yesterday such Gallic failings served to keep the Irish on the front foot.

If there was a turning point – and there were many who thought the first mistake of the day was made by the bungling French half-backs in deciding to get out of bed – then it was at the end of the first half, with Ireland nine points to the good but pegged back on the try line. They held firm as the French fly-half, François Gelez, and his young scrum-half, Dimitri Yachvili, contrived to waste chance after chance to release their criminally underused backline.

O'Sullivan's huge sigh of relief as the referee, Andre Watson, blew for the interval was just one that filled the old stadium. "That spell just before half-time I think just might have been the key moment. If they had scored then and gone into the break with a try and their backs up then things might just have been different," he said. "I thought our defence was magnificent today."

Indeed it was, particularly in that siege and in the dying moments of the second half, when France started to realise that salvation may lie in their runners. But Ireland had committed too much to the cause by then to let it slip and threw everything into the tackle.

At times their exuberance got the better of them, such as when Kevin Maggs hit Vincent Clerc dangerously high – the former curb-layer turning Clerc-layer as one wag put it – but that was only Irish paranoia manifesting itself, that France were capable of scoring from anywhere, at any time. They probably paid their visitors too much respect as France once again backed themselves into a corner alien to their free-scoring nature.

"Our only satisfication is that we have the best defence in the Six Nations," the French coach, Bernard Laporte, said. "England only scored one try against us and Ireland haven't scored any today. The only problem is we can't score either."

It is a problem that Ireland are a million miles away from as they head towards Cardiff claiming that only victory over the woeful Welsh is occupying their minds. "That is how you can tell a professional team," O'Sullivan said. "The ones that keep their minds on the job in hand." Easier said than done in a city desperate for a first Grand Slam since 1948. Here they believe it may be worth all the waiting.