You'll have to wade through an awful lot of spin first, though. Bucket loads of it in fact and before we go anywhere, we'll feed you with this basic premise. If there's nothing to hide, you don't need to spin. It's a basic rule of PR. The facts, if they are indeed facts, will always speak for themselves.

Always. You don't need to polish them or dress them up in their Sunday best. They only reason you do that is to make them into something they're not. Mutton dressed as lamb, if you will.

Eddie O'Sullivan was quick off the mark last Saturday in his post-match interview with RTE. We played all the rugby, France did nothing, we handed them the game on a plate, we should have won. That's the paraphrased version but we're not doing him a disservice if we leave it at that. That was the point he was trying to get across to the Irish public. That is what he meant. That was the picture he wanted to paint.

One of Gerard Houllier's key beliefs when he managed Liverpool was that one of his most important parts of his week was the post-match press conference. It, the Frenchman felt, set the tone at the club for the next couple of days. If he wanted to give the players a kick up the backside, he'd tear into them.

If he wanted to take a softly, softly approach, he'd blame anyone, everyone but his own players. If he felt he had to watch his own back, he'd say his side were mercifully unlucky.

That Houllier analogy has a lot of resonance with how O'Sullivan behaved this week.

From the word go the Irish coach was in spin mode, partly to protect his players but mostly to look after himself.

At the post-match press conference he reiterated his statements from his RTE interview. The following morning at the team hotel, he insisted to an English journalist he didn't know what the term "catch-up" rugby actually meant, even though he used the term the previous year to describe Ireland's last 20 minutes against Wales at the Millennium Stadium.

On Tuesday he arrived into another press briefing at the Killiney Castle Hotel armed with a sheet of statistics gleaned from the game. He was like a government minister attempting to put a gloss on unemployment figures, or hospital waiting lists or tax increases. We didn't altar our gameplan at half-time. We played all the rugby. We handed them five tries on a plate.

Same spin, different day.

Let's cut through it all before we fall over with dizziness and get a few things straight. Ireland didn't hand France five tries on a plate, or any other kind of dining serving utensil you choose to use.

The French forced them into it. There was a quote from a football pundit at a Premiership match a few years back stating that one team needed to start forcing the other into making unforced errors.

An oxymoron, for sure, but there's an unintentional sense in that sentence. Errors like the ones we saw from Ireland last weekend don't come about by accident, they come about because the players out there are being put under pressure. Ireland were destroyed in the tackle zone in the first 20 minutes on Saturday, somewhat akin to the job Munster did on Sale in that particular area back in January. Thus, the Irish players were, understandably, reluctant to head into direct contact.

Hence the tries.

But if we are to use the O'Sullivan line on Ireland serving up five tries to France on a set of silver platters, then it's also fair to say that the hosts returned the compliment for Ireland's four efforts. The home side undoubtedly let their concentration slip defensively in the second half. Watch the video, it's easy to see. Would a French side with their foot firmly on the pedal have allowed the gap to develop on their own line for O'Gara's try? Would Gordon D'Arcy have been allowed a one-onone run at Fabien Pelous, a second row, if the French were fully switched on?

Would Brian O'Driscoll have been allowed the same run at a weary French captain to set up Andrew Trimble had the French defensive line been truly locked and loaded?

All that's not to say that we didn't witness a supremely brave second-half effort from the Irish team but a dozy French side allowed them to turn impressive determination into significant points on the board. One candid quote from scrumhalf Jean-Baptiste Elissalde summed it all up best. "We are brought up like little rich boys and we feel when we get what we want, why hurt ourselves a little bit more?" said the Toulousian after last weekend's game. "It's part of the way we are raised. It's typically French. In that area we need to learn to copy the Anglo-Saxons."

So while O'Sullivan is perfectly entitled to pedal whatever he wants to the Irish public . . . it's a waste of everybody's time but it may make him feel better . . . it must be hoped that he doesn't actually start to believe what he's saying.

Last weekend, Ireland went onto the field with an undercooked gameplan, one that didn't appear to have been thought out properly and that's something that drastically needs to be adjusted before Wales come to town. Scotland did most of their damage to France through mauling or pick-andgoes around the ruck area. So why, then, did Ireland not marry at least a hint of all that into their game? Why did it take until the 37th minute for Ireland to whip the maul from their suitcase?

Why did they continue to try to stretch the game when the looseness of proceedings was the thing that was actually costing them tries? It really is beyond any reasonable comprehension.

O'Sullivan has been repeating all week that Ireland didn't change their tactics in the second half but even his own spin goes against that belief.

Last Tuesday, armed with his magic sheet of paper, the coach stated that Ireland had 16 attacks in the first half and 24 in the second half. Of the first-half attacks, eight were concentrated out wide and eight up the middle. Equally split 50-50, in other words. In the second period, there were eight attacks out wide and 16 attacks through the middle. A 33-66 split this time around. And the coach still tries to tell us that Ireland did nothing different in the second half. It's a line too far.

Next Sunday is a huge game for O'Sullivan, make no mistake. He's been defensive, aggressive and bullish since Paul Honiss blew his final whistle last weekend, knowing full well that he had an awful lot to defend, despite the mini-comeback. Let's just hope that against Wales the rugby does the talking and not anyone else.

After all, good rugby needs nobody to speak for it.