France 13
Wales 9
Panache and patience, brutality and brilliance, savvy and strength. This is a special France team and it contains multitudes, and how they needed them. With fluency difficult on a tense Friday night against a ferociously defiant Wales effort, France needed to fight.
Grand Slams are not supposed to come easy, but few would deny that this crop of Les Bleus deserves their chance to end a 12-year drought next weekend. To look wider than the Six Nations context, a scarier proposition is how good they could be by the time they host the World Cup. Because they will have learned a great deal from an imperfect night at the Principality Stadium on which Wales, led by Dan Biggar, Taulupe Faletau and Will Rowlands, pushed them hard.
France were sublime in patches at Murrayfield a fortnight ago. Overall, they had seemed to be the dominant outfit in this Six Nations. And yet, their promise over the past two Championships had not come to fruition with a clean sweep – or even a title victory. In 2020, Mohamed Haouas was sent off for a straight right hand that rearranged Jamie Ritchie's nose. A year later, England overturned them before Scotland pulled off a Paris smash-and-grab.
This always felt like a slippery red banana skin on the final bend of a possible chelem. Wales characteristically grow tighter and gradually improve throughout these tournaments. Faletau had been phenomenal at Twickenham against England. Elsewhere in the back row, Josh Navidi, one of the toughest grapple-tacklers and carriers around, was back for his first Test since a tour de force in Paris 12 months previously.