So what do you do when you're 29-3 down at the break? There was a lot of talk at half-time about pride and the vow we made was that we'd be able to walk off the pitch being able to look each other in the eye.

Tactically we knew that we weren't that far off making our game plan work and that's the way it proved. All of a sudden we were able to break the first French tackle, make some decent clean bursts, and things happened from there. And look at the last 20 minutes.

There was only one team in it and after Andrew Trimble crossed for that fourth try with eight minutes to go. I really felt that we had a chance of winning the game. We could have made a couple of smarter decisions in those closing minutes but the French were in big trouble and I felt they were helped out of it by a couple of dodgy penalty decisions against us. But the fact of the matter was we outplayed them and we were all able to walk off the pitch with our heads held high. That was extremely important especially after what had happened in the Italy game.

When we watched the video of that game, we weren't overly critical by any stretch of the imagination. It wasn't a case of panic stations, we didn't do a lot of things all that well but in a game like last week's one, there's a small margin between winning and winning by a big margin and I don' think we were that far away from really pulling away from them and posting a big score.

One thing we did agree on was that the forwards got through the work that was expected of them and the backs, well, the backs didn't. We held our hands up for that but I think yesterday, in the second half especially, we played to the level that we expect from ourselves out wide.

Despite the misery in the media after the Italy game, the camp was in good spirits all week and that's the way it's pretty much been since we met up at the end of January. Things tend to go quite slowly in the middle of the week, Tuesday and Wednesday generally, but we always managed to find a few activities to keep the mind alive. Like on Tuesday we advanced our table tennis rotation game to include obstacles, cereal boxes and the like, around the side of the table to make it a bit more interesting for those who were next in line with the paddle. And we put a few tuna cans on the table as well as out of bounds areas. It may not sound riveting but trust me, if you knew the punishment for losing a point, you'd be pretty interested in how the whole thing works, too.

Then on Wednesday after our morning meeting, Geordan Murphy asked if anyone was up for going to Crumlin Street Children's Hospital for a visit. Usually these things are planned in advance but six of us went with him, stopping off at the IRFU offices to pick up boxes of DVD's and miniBrocs for the kids. It's always an inspirational place to visit. So many of the kids out there have been through hard operations in the recent past and to see them bouncing around the place with enthusiasm having been through so much gives you a reality check of sorts.

Everybody, both ourselves, and the kids hopefully, got something from the visit.

Now, we've really got to take everything we can from yesterday's game and go forward with it. There's a kind of surreal mood in the camp right now because we don't really know how to feel after all of that. In a way, we feel that we've won the game after our secondhalf performance but then the realisation hits that no, we lost, and that we managed to concede 43 points in the process. I suppose you can say that it's a moral victory of sorts but we're probably beyond boasting about things like that at this stage in our development.

But the truth of the matter is that we came to France, played all the rugby and still got beaten. We can be happy for playing the rugby, not so happy for losing. The most important thing, though, is that we were able to walk out of here with our heads held high when we could easily have been walking around the place in a mood of depression for the next couple of weeks.