And Gatland, whose Wales side are undefeated since their opening day loss to England, has raised question marks about French fitness levels in the build-up to this evening’s game.

"If we can keep the ball in play for over 40 minutes... we just think the French may struggle a little bit up front," he said.

"When teams kick a lot of ball at you, sometimes you're forced into having to reply with a kick to play a little bit of ping-pong, a little bit of a territory game, which we were forced into a bit last week [against Ireland].

"But hopefully this week it'll give us an opportunity to keep the ball on the park. Fitness-wise we feel like we're in pretty good shape. We've worked hard in this campaign.

"It's an aspect that we've been improving on all the time and it's been a massive focus for us in the last two or three seasons, sometimes to the detriment of our game because we have put a huge focus on that.

"And I've kept saying to compete against the best teams in the world we've got to be able to compete against them physically.

"You can go out and get one-off wins and I think if you look at the last year or so, yes we've lost games, but at least we know we're in the game physically and there's not a lot of difference now between us and the top teams in terms of territory and possession."