More concentration required.

And so to Europe, it's a breath-taking pace this season. The three weeks between seasons was fast enough but European games in 4th and 5th game up makes your head spin.

While we were offline in the off-season the EPRC draw was mostly ignored here. The cut-down competition means we play two teams home and away in the pool stages and we drew Pau and Agen, both places we've been to (and I've toured) before. Pau was a fine time, it's a large town/small city and we had a lot of fun there but it felt mostly generic France. Agen, however, was a blast, a beautiful little town with a lot of nice bars and restaurants - it may have been embellished by the Paul Franze-wonder-try-driven last gasp victory but it was a great place to go. It is yet another 2020 tragedy that we've drawn Agen (and to a lesser degree, Pau) this year, a great tour goes begging.

The game, however, was easily missable. So much so that I got the kick-off time wrong and spent the first half hanging Christmas lights on my house. I got onto the stream with a few minutes to play and Irish 3 - 19 up. I gather a welcome return for Albert Tuisuie from Fiji-duties allowed the big lad to open the scoring crashing-over from a ruck. A missed conversion and converted penalty left the score 3 - 5. Albert was clearly happy to be back, scoring again with Steve Mafi joining him shortly afterwards and Theo Brophy-Clews adding the extras to both to get up to where I joined the stream.

The stream was fine video quality but (unless I missed how to get it) it had no commentary or audio at all that I could hear. I've often moaned about having to listen to various people commentating on rugby but I discovered that when there's no sound at all I pay very little attention. Irish scored the BP try shortly after the restart with Ollie Hassell-Collins skipping down the wing and squeezing the ball in at the corner. TBC missed a difficult conversion. I'm afraid all that info comes from the offy match report because I looked away and, with no audio cues, missed it completely.

I steeled my concentration and duly Agen found their form, scoring a good driving try (which, obviously, I saw), the home side finally showing some metal and breaching Irish's impressive defence. They continued to trouble the defence for much of the half before Irish closed the half out with a team try finished by Phil Cockanasiga. Huzzah! I saw Irish score!

Final score: Agen 8 - 34 Irish.

It was a fine effort from Irish, pretty-much closing the game out before half-time and continuing the job at the end but I'm going to bet the Agen try stung as it should have been stopped. To be fair I think it shocked Agen as much as it did us, the French club are clearly having trouble this year as they prop-up the Top 14 and were a shadow of the team I've seen play a fair few times. I wish them well and hope we can all visit there again soon.