Wales 15 - 17 Ireland

Congratulations to Ireland on their second grand slam ever. And despite finishing fourth, congratulations to Wales for producing, with the exception of the Italy game and in my opinion, the best games of a rather turgid 6N.

This game was in many ways the culmination of a bad spring. There was tension, there was willingness to try and attack from both sides (something England until last week, Scotland and Italy, and Ireland for most weeks) seemed to lack. There was ferocious, committed and mostly very successful defence. There was passion (possibly too much in a few players), and it all came down to the very last kick of the game. If Stephen Jones had kicked it 5m further, Ireland wouldn't be celebrating in the same way tonight.

The Irish "golden generation" has finally delivered as well.

If you look at the stats one thing that will leap out is handling errors. If you haven't watched the match as well, you'd think it was a really scrappy game. But, if we steal a stat from tennis with forced and unforced errors, the unforced error count was really low - about 2 on each side, everything else was caused by the weight of the tackle, tackles that hit the ball and so on.

Ireland, again, had an inspired 10 minutes after the break, in which they scored 2 tries and laid the foundation for their win. Wales chipped away with penalties and a drop goal - leading 6-0 at half time, and pulling back to 15-14 in front until ROG found a drop goal, and then Jones missed that last kick.

The game wasn't a classic in the sense of making a memorable match that I'd want to watch again and again, but was still gripping and by far the best of the bunch this year.