BEFORE CATCHING THE team’s flight back to Dublin from Paris on Sunday morning, Andrew Conway was in the same boat as the rest of us: wondering where it all went wrong at the Stade de France.

He stressed on a couple of occasions that he had not yet had to chance to rewatch France’s 35-27 win over Ireland and so he was reticent to commit to definitive conclusions, relying instead on a more guttural impression of Ireland’s shortcomings as he experienced them from his right flank.

The Munster wing did offer a brief insight into Farrell’s half-time team talk, by which time France’s four-point lead scarcely seemed insurmountable to the naked eye.

Ireland’s head coach had revealed post-match on Saturday night that the chat at the interval centered on ‘belief’, with Conway adding to that theme on Sunday morning:

“We probably were just ‘off’ in the first half. We did some okay things but our body language probably wasn’t great at times. The coaches were looking on and know us well enough to feel we were a bit off, so that’s what the message was — the message was to believe going into the second half with a championship on the line. There was only a couple of points in it or whatever it was.

It’s disappointing that that type of chat has to be had in the environment that we’re in but that was the reality of where we were at and, unfortunately, we didn’t kick on.

As for exactly why Ireland not only failed to kick on but actually regressed in the second half, Conway was understandably not entirely sure less than 12 hours on from the full-time whistle.

Like his head coach, he lamented Ireland’s inability to take their chances at crucial junctures. He was critical, too, of his own role in a botched contestable which culminated in Romain Ntamack crossing the whitewash 70 yards down the field just over 10 seconds later, saying: “We know that if you give them easy ball — like that one, I’m gone after it, I didn’t get in a contest to even make it a 50:50 or make it even hard for whoever the receiver was; and then you get punished.”

That try made it a two-score game early in the second half, and suddenly left Ireland’s task looking quixotic.

“That’s probably the most disappointing thing, really,” Conway added. “You don’t necessarily mind if you make it really tough for a team and they get in in the corner or there’s a piece of magic where you can just say, ‘Fair play to ya’, but when you don’t put your best foot forward in instances like that and you’re in against some of the best teams in the world, in their backyard, they’re going to punish you like they did.”

Gael Fickou competes in the air with Andrew Conway. Dave Winter / INPHO Dave Winter / INPHO / INPHO

Going back to the body language to which he alluded earlier, it was put to the 29-year-old that while Ireland never threw in the towel in Paris, their heads went after Ntamack’s key score, from which point errors became compounded: kicks to touch were missed, lineouts were lost in quick succession, and Ireland’s hopes of a championship fizzled out despite their remaining physically competitive until the final blast of Wayne Barnes’ whistle.

“Yeah, yeah, maybe,” Conway said. “Compounding errors, you’re backing up negative with negative and you’re going to be in trouble. Likewise, on the flipside, you want to put positive after positive after positive and then you’re potentially in a scoring position.

It’s easy to say we shouldn’t miss touch or we shouldn’t mess up a lineout, or the accuracy wasn’t there — that’s easy for me to say. The reality is we’re in a Test-match environment and things do go wrong. And obviously we work as hard as we can during the week and be prepared as we can for that not to happen. But it does happen, and it’s obviously disappointing for us that it happened in such a big game with such a huge opportunity for us.

“I can sit here and say we’ll learn from everything but we don’t want to be in that position again. I don’t know — we’ve just got to rally around each other and just continually try and get better. There are going to be some highs coming up and obviously, there are always going to be some lows at some stage in the next months or years. But as a group, we’re early on under ‘Faz’, there’s a great group of lads, we feel like we’ve got a great squad to push on and have a big few months and keep going, you know?

“We’re going to keep quite tight-knit and look forward to a big month of new rugby, new format, new competition, and see what we can do.”