After that period, France stepped things up and ran riot against their young opponents. Relive all of the action from the opening clash at the Stade de France in our live blog below:. Owen [Watkin] is in a brace and it could be an ACL; Aaron [Wainwright] needs another head injury assessment and has got quite a nasty gash. The players have worked hard in the last couple of weeks and we are pretty aware of how important next week is for us.
I thought there were some positives, our scrum was good tonight, some really good defensive sets. It is about where can we fix up and be game smart to keep putting the opposition under pressure. We tried to go out with a positive attitude, and I thought we started well. But we put ourselves under pressure at times by overplaying. They were a little bit more experienced in a couple of areas. I thought they put us under pressure. When we did go to the air, we got some reward ourselves, and we probably needed to use that opportunity a little bit more.
That is some of the game management that some of the players will learn from. The Paris symphony orchestra are back in session. Forced away from their suburban concert hall last year by the Olympics, on their Six Nations to the Stade de France this fabulous French side giving the capital crowd a night to remember. Twelve months ago, in Marseille they had played all the wrong notes in the wrong order to be badly beaten by Ireland; Wales may not be in the class of the two-time defending champions but this was a drastic improvement.
They have the capacity to play far better than they did in this thrashing. It is their ability to blend a mighty percussion section with the softer strings that marks France out as tournament favourites, but the difference in this fixture, and perhaps to this tournament, was their masterful maestro of a conductor.
The peerless Antoine Dupont , absent last year en route to securing Olympic gold, is back where he belongs. Peerless Antoine Dupont leads fabulous French to victory as Wales hit a new low. The only real negative for France was the red card for Romain Ntamack after he caught Ben Thomas in the head with his shoulder.
