Ireland coach Scott Bemand hailed the brave display of his side in their opening 38-17 Six Nations defeat by France in Le Mans.
The Irish were crushed 55-3 by France on the way to last season’s Wooden Spoon but were much improved a year on.
“I’m really proud of the effort,” said Bemand who took the Ireland job after Greg McWilliams’ departure last May.
“We know that anybody in our wider squad will defend this Irish shirt with everything they’ve got.”
Things looked ominous for the Irish after France scrum-half Pauline Bourdon Sansus touched down after only three minutes.
However, Ireland conceded only one further try before half-time as Marine Menager ran under the posts after taking a lovely off-load from Bourdon Sansus, with Nicole Fowley having earlier got the visitors on the scoreboard with a 14th-minute penalty.
And while player of the match Madoussou Fall, Agathe Sochat and Elisa Riffonneau added further France tries, the Irish never gave up and the impressive Aoife Waver and Aoife Dalton notched late responses, which were converted by Dannah O’Brien.
“Coming here was always going to be a big ask that we were really realistic about,” added Bemand.
“What we wanted to see was to start to bed a couple of things in. We said that we’ve got to be hard to beat.
“Some of those French tries, and they scored some good ones out there, we’ve actually made them work for it.”
Bemand acknowledged that the Ireland set-piece, in particular the line-out, had “creaked a few times but we can tidy that up”.
“The more confident we get, the more technically competent we will become.
“Next week, we welcome Italy to our shores and hopefully we can sort that out and fire more shots.”
Ireland captain Edel McMahon said the team had shown “an awful lot of heart today”.
“We actually competed with France at times and we scored a try in the 77th minute because we put pressure on them.
“We need to clean up a lot of things. We need to sort the handlings errors and looking on to next week, we really need to tweak that line-out.
“We had a clear gameplan going into this match and we stuck with that for the whole game.
“And I think we’ll take a lot of confidence from that defensive effort.”
