a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z0GMBaSoOOM/SamXsYsTOaI/AAAAAAAAC0A/GfeOEORH2Kk/s1600-h/imanol.jpg"img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 350px; height: 200px;" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Z0GMBaSoOOM/SamXsYsTOaI/AAAAAAAAC0A/GfeOEORH2Kk/s400/imanol.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5307940424631138722" border="0" //aspan style="font-weight: bold;"Wales were defeated on Friday night in Paris 21-16 as hosts France destroyed their hopes of achieving a back-to-back Grand Slam, which would have been the first time since 1909. /spanbr /br /Eight successive Six Nations victories came to an end at Stade de France, in the tournaments first ever Friday night fixture.br /br /The Welsh blew a 13-3 halftime lead after looking in control following a great try from the speedy Lee Byrne and eight points from fly-half Stephen Jones.br /br /France fought back though as 20 year old Matthieu Bastareaud justified his selection by Marc Lievremont, having an excellent game. Surprise choice at fly-half Benoit Baby and goalkicker Morgan Parra both silenced the naysayers. br /br /Parra slotted three penalties and a conversion as France edged the try-count through scores by flanker Thierry Dusautoir and wing Cedric Heymans.br /br /Wales will be ruing missed chances as they had the opportunity to equal the Six Nations record of nine wins in a row, jointly held by England and France.br /br /Welsh coach Warren Gatland accepted that his side lost to the better team.br /br /"There were no excuses the better team won," he said. "We were 13-3 up and we needed to be a bit smarter.br /br /"If we had scored just before half-time it would have made it a different game.br /br /"France were a bit more desperate than we were and they had been under a lot of pressure as a team. That galvanises a team and brings the best out of you.br /br /"This wasn't a game that got away from us we are just disappointed with our performance.br /br /centerobject height="280" width="400"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/orcmEawu8t8amp;hl=enamp;fs=1amp;rel=0"param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/orcmEawu8t8amp;hl=enamp;fs=1amp;rel=0" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" height="280" width="400"/embed/object/centerbr /span style="font-size:85%;"span style="font-weight: bold;"Time: /span04:08/spandiv class="blogger-post-footer"www.rugbydump.com/divdiv class="feedflare"a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/rugbydump?a=DzdTIIxOM7A:e2d6AUvbdII:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/rugbydump?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a/divimg src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/rugbydump/~4/DzdTIIxOM7A" height="1" width="1"/ More...