WALES coach Steve Hansen has answered French captain Fabien Pelous' stinging suggestion that Wales are soft up front and that France will attack them there.

"It shows how they feel about us, but if it means they come with a soft under-belly themselves that would be good," said Hansen.

Pelous had said, "We have the means to dominate them and impose our game.

"They were quite good in the World Cup, they're a good team, but they're not the best at the moment. We have to aim for a perfect match."

And Hansen appeared to disagree slightly with his skipper Colin Charvis about whether the team would target returning outside half Frederic Michalak after skills coach Scott Johnson suggested they would find out whether he had recovered from his shoulder injury.

"You'd never target someone's injury," said Charvis, but Hansen added, "anyone in the French side will be tested.

"The number 10 carries the ball a lot, and we could carry the ball down that channel a bit."

Hansen has revealed how he was hurt as much as anyone by the team's disappointing performance against Ireland a fortnight ago.

After all the promise of the World Cup, which was maintained to a degree against Scotland in the first Six Nations game of the season, Wales fell to a disastrous 36-15 defeat in Dublin, trailing 36-3 at one stage.

Hansen appears to many to be pretty deadpan, even unemotional, but that is not the case and he showed his feelings yesterday almost on the eve of the must-win game against France.

"Of course it hurts," he said. "I like winning arguments never mind a game of rugby, but you can either crawl up in a ball or you can say you've got a lot to learn and get on with it.

"Coaching is about problem solving and learning, and it's painful, especially if you are moving on, and we are. We're nowhere near where we were a year ago.

"I just want us to play the best we can, then we've got a chance of winning it against France, we did it against England."

Hansen insists that days like the one in Ireland happen.

"If you've done a lot of coaching you know that this happens, the team makes progress and then gets comfortable and drop off, say five per cent," said Hansen.

"If you clean windows and think they're clean there may be five per cent which is not done like in the corners, it's the same thing.

"I was more disappointed than surprised, I've almost been waiting for it to happen but you have to go through it and learn.

"Our preparations have got to be spot on all the time, we can't be 95 per cent.

"We all felt, me included, that everything was right for Ireland, I didn't expect that.

"But the important thing when you get days like that is to identify the issue like the driving line-out and sort it out and put the emphasis on those areas in training."