Learning to Defend against the French Part 1

In this game I chose a bad way to defend against the French.  At the end I got desperate to find a quick mate and it costed me the game because he had a winning tactic.  My attack was actually a pointless one, but here is a good example of a premature attack that involved a sacrifice in material that later proved fatal because my opponent had tactics due to the files opened by his eating of my pawn.  In this variation of the french usually black can usually grab either 1 or two pawns if he is sneaky enough, which is why now I don't play it.  This game was played by me years ago, and interestingly enough, recently I played a game that started out as a Alapin Sicilian that later transposed into this French Defense opening line.  You can imagine how irritated I was :D.  Anyway, here is the game:

More to come.  There are other ways to deal with the french that I believe are more solid.  Two come to mind, but I will mention them in later instances in my blog.  

Last ditch notes on the game:

The moving of my rook to my second rank was probably unnecessary.  I should have kept both of my rooks on my back rank to avoid the tactic that occured in game.  Perhaps then my plan would have worked.  However, my pawn was weak, it would easily be attacked by his queen.  Anyway I didn't analyse it further the point of this blog is to just show that this response to the french usually ends up losing a pawn or two in the opening, it's probably a good idea not to play it, unless you like being down a pawn or two.  In my next blog I will show you a slight improvement on this game.