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{ Maxime Médard of France evades Ireland's Tomás O'Leary to score his side's only try in the Six Nations match in Dublin. Photograph: Warren Little/Getty Images

And then there were two. The second round of the Six Nations finished in Dublin with only France and England left to dream of a grand slam after a pulsating 80 minutes in which the French just squeezed home.

France lost the try count three to one but a couple of old heads saw them and Le Crunch at Twickenham in two weeks looks even more mouthwatering. Ireland, who head to Murrayfield hoping they might still have a say in the championship, were vastly improved compared to their display in Rome, but they have now beaten France only once in 10 matches.

After a lacklustre autumn and that feeble victory over Italy, Ireland promised fire and brimstone from the start. But no one really expected them to be seven points up within five minutes, with France barely getting a sniff. Brian O'Driscoll played a perfect runaround with Jonathan Sexton from a Paul O'Connell lineout take and Luke Fitzgerald was in at the corner in under two minutes – only for the referee, Dave Pearson, to spot a forward pass.

It looked as though France would weather the storm. They even tried to run the ball off the back of the subsequent scrum, but after Yoann Huget and Damien Traille got the move off to a smooth start but the full-back, Clément Poitrenaud, dropped the ball. A ball bouncing free five metres out was just what Ireland fancied and the wing Fergus McFadden went over close enough to the posts to make Sexton's conversion easy.

Ireland even won a penalty off the France scrum – Nicolas Mas being adjudged to have dropped it – to wipe out a penalty for offside that had been kicked by Morgan Parra. But then the first signs of a French fightback began to show. Fast hands put Huget up the right, Maxime Médard sent Poitrenaud up the left and Parra kicked a couple of penalties to make it 10-9. The French pack then got a nudge on for the first time, Donncha O'Callaghan was caught not rolling away and the Parra kicked his fourth penalty to put France in the lead for the first time, after 26 minutes.

Ireland bounced back and within 10 minutes their scrum-half, Tomás O'Leary, who had been a real doubt with back spasms, and the prop Mike Ross threw themselves at the line. The French held out against the short-range battering and when Sexton fumbled it appeared that an overlap on the left might have been wasted. But O'Leary was on hand a second time, the scrum-half scrambling to the line with Mas clinging to his back to give Ireland a three-point half-time lead.

Parra pulled that back when the centre Gordon D'Arcy was caught failing to release in the tackle, but exasperation in the French camp was becoming more obvious as the replacements warmed up. One more front-row indiscretion saw the prop Thomas Domingo, a hero last week when Scotland were pushed all over Paris, replaced by Sylvain Marconnet and another veteran, Vincent Clerc, came on for the erratic Poitrenaud.

Fingers are often pointed when Marc Lièvremont empties his bench, but this time the travelling French got some reward for their head coach's tinkering. Barely had Dimitri Yachvili replaced Parra at scrum-half than France had scored their first and only try, a simple affair off the back of a solid scrum. The ball went right, Aurélien Rougerie battered a hole in the Irish defence and Médard cruised up on the outside for a score that Yachvili converted with ease.

The Biarritz scrum half missed with a long-range penalty but then landed a more difficult shot from wide on the right. All of a sudden the French had a 10-point lead, with 18 minutes to go.

Again, Ireland came back. Declan Kidney threw on the veteran fly-half Ronan O'Gara and the new chemistry brought immediate rewards, if not necessarily in the way intended. O'Gara's 67th-minute chip looked to be going nowhere but David Wallace did what a good flanker does and cleaned up, leaving the No8 Jamie Heaslip with a dive for the corner.

The theatre continued with O'Gara, Ireland's saviour in Rome, converting the try with the help of the left upright, but this time there was no rabbit to be plucked from the hat.

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Labels: France, Guardian, Ireland, muchimproved, Nations