Gordon D'Arcy scraps with the French defence © Getty Images

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Players/Officials: Gordon D'Arcy

Tournaments/Tours: Six Nations

Teams: France | Ireland

Ireland centre Gordon D'Arcy has admitted that there will be plenty of soul searching in the wake of their humbling 33-10 defeat to France in Paris.

The reigning Six Nations champions saw a 12-match unbeaten run ended by a powerful French side, who scored tries through hooker William Servat, centre Yannick Jauzion and fullback Clement Poitrenaud to steal a march in this year's tournament.

"A reality check, a kick in the ass - you can put 100 different names on that result," he said. "We got right a lot of things that we did wrong against Italy last weekend, but were slack in other areas.

"We know what we have to do now and next week will be a fairly honest week, to say the least. We've got to roll with the punches. But the great thing about sport is that next week is a clean slate, so as long as you're selected you get the chance to make up for it.

"The championship is still open. All we can do now is try and win our remaining games while hoping somebody nicks one against France. Then if we win it, we win it. If we don't then we'll have gone out on a high."

D'Arcy was forced onto the wing by an injury to Rob Kearney, with Keith Earls moving to fullback, and Ireland were left to rue a yellow card for prop Cian Healy and a foolish trip by Jerry Flannery on Alexis Palisson. The visitors had made the better start, but never recovered after a 10 point swing during Healy's sin-binning.

"Look at France's body language body during that first 20 minutes," D'Arcy said. "We were all upright and they had their hands on their knees, but we just didn't capitalise and then the error rate started increasing.

"We had them under pressure and they were beginning to creak but then we let them out of it. Look at David Wallace's try - that was the gameplan, but we didn't always got it right. We probably made the highest number of unforced errors in a long time. Little errors accumulated.

"Last week we let Italy out of their 22 cheaply and we did the same against France. The difference is France can shift and put pace on the ball. We can do better than this but we shot ourselves in the foot."