has Gatland backed Wales finish on high?

land close. Potentially, the winners could earn around £2 million more in Six Nations prize money than the losers in Cardiff. It is a game that matters and the visitors will be up for it.

Justin Tipuric is still out of position at blindside, but he played so well against Italy he made himself pretty much undroppable. Wales will need another strong effort from the Osprey in the contact area and around the field. He is a better No. 7, but it didn’t seem to make any difference to him last weekend. Quality comes through wherever it is deployed. France will hope to win the front five battle — they feel able to leave Rabah Slimani, Wales’s scrum nemesis in Paris last year, on the bench — to set in place a platform for their powerful back row of Wenceslas Lauret, Marc Tauleigne and Yacouba Camara. It is up to Wales to stop that happening.

Gatland will want Biggar and Gareth Davies to play with control at half back and Scott Williams and Hadleigh Parkes to keep a tight rein on the half-man, half-mountain that is Mathieu Bastareaud.

Earlier this week, Wales’s head coach attended Ladies’ Day at the Cheltenham horse racing festival. It isn’t known if he had a flutter, but it might just have caught his eye that a horse called Carefully Selected featured on the card. The Kiwi’s team would have been carefully selected, too. The name didn’t help the horse. It lost. Home advantage should go some way to helping Gatland’s side avoid that fate, but the French have rediscovered a measure of self belief and it promises to be close.

Wales have 724 caps in their starting line-up against the opposition’s 289. A day for experience to count, perhaps.

Gatland will hope so.