The players in those blue shirts were French after all, a nation with so many paradoxes you'd need the help of a pull-out supplement to list them here. Take the Stade de France for one, the stadium on the industrial wastelands of north Paris and possibly the best advertisement you could ever find for city-centre stadiums. Sure, it's as aesthetically pleasing a building as you're likely to find on this earth, but you're likely to find more atmosphere on the moon. The place simply has no soul and despite the hordes of baguette-waving, beretwearing, red-wine drinking, cockerel-carrying French yahoos outside the ground, it's almost as though they have to decommission their stereotypes at the turnstile. The Stade de France could be anywhere in the world and that's probably why the French have struggled so badly here since the Parc des Princes was passed over for its better looking sister back in 1998.

Yesterday, as we've said, they were 43-3 points to the good and instead of piling on the points, they fell asleep. To be honest, it was more like a coma. The statistics at the end show that they missed 21 tackles during the game, and you can bet most of those came in the final 30 minutes when Ireland scored four tries in 15 minutes and could have scored a couple more had they had their wits about them.

During that period, Ireland looked like a team re-invented, everything they did was beautiful on the eye and linked together wonderfully well.

But what happened during the first 50 minutes, when they held onto the ball for phase after phase but appeared utterly confused as to what they were supposed to do with it? How can you explain a 50-minute period where Ireland handed France five tries on a plate?

That was the bout of ugliness that muddled everything else that went on.

You kind of got the feeling things weren't going to go Ireland's way leading into the game. Marcus Horan was struck down with a dose of the winter vomiting bug on Thursday, a bad enough sign in itself you might say, but especially so when an illness like that hits a good ten days into spring. It then got worse during that opening 50 minutes when, in order of appearance, Tommy Bowe, Shane Horgan, Denis Leamy, Ronan O'Gara and Geordan Murphy all contributed directly to France's first-half tries, and then O'Gara helped David Marty out for a second-time just after the second-half got underway. Forty points down Ireland decided to play, as much for their own personal pride as anything else.

And they did manage to restore that pride, upping the tempo of the game and playing what was in front of them.

The likes of Horgan, Murphy, Leamy, Paul O'Connell and Brian O'Driscoll led the fight back and with the game book out the window, Ireland looked a side reborn as O'Gara, Gordon D'Arcy, Donncha O'Callaghan and Andrew Trimble all crossed for tries as the home crowd, at last, became involved, even if it was only to jeer their side.

Those jeers resonated again at the final whistle, leading us to wonder if there was any other place in the world where you could be given the bird for winning 43-31.

A place of contradictions, no doubt, beauty and ugliness all wrapped together in nearly 90 minutes of rugby and at the end we still really don't have a clue what happened out there, if France fell asleep or if Ireland gave us a true glimpse of the future. But you've got to love it all, even if it doesn't make any sense.

And by that we mean both the French and the game.