The irony isn’t lost on Brian O’Driscoll; all the recent gains made in increasing the visibility of women in sport, yet an apparent gag put on Ireland’s players before their final Six Nations game against Italy.
Media policy’ was the anodyne description of a decision not to present any player at either of this week’s press conferences following last weekend’s sobering 15-56 trouncing at the hands of France.
But it seemed to communicate some strange absence of trust in a week that took a faintly sulphurous turn on Tuesday with coach Adam Griggs struggling to answer a simple question about who was actually “in charge” of women’s rugby in Ireland.
In resurrecting the question on Thursday so that he himself might summon a more coherent answer, Griggs merely gave the impression of a man on someone else’s errand.
This wasn’t a quarrel about a heavy loss to semi-professional opposition, it was an attempted exploration of the IRFU’s vision for the women’s game here. A search for some identifiable pathway between AIL level and the international stage.
And it asked a simple question. Who is in charge?
O’Driscoll says he had some sympathy for Griggs. “I must say that I felt for him,” he revealed yesterday. “By the sound of things, he’s only privy to certain information. When you’re asked something and you don’t have the answers, it kind of disconnects you from what is going on with the IRFU.
“Then coming back and having the answers for people in his subsequent press conference, I suppose that just doesn’t help the overall picture of things, does it?
“He’s ultimately a coach trying to prepare the women for this Six Nations and he was caught on the hop. I’m sure that it wasn’t through his own ignorance that he didn’t have those details. It just seemed like there is a disconnect of communications going on.”
If anything, the absence of any player interviews this week then served only to compound the image of a camp somehow under siege.
For O’Driscoll, a strong advocate of the 20x20 movement that wrapped up its two-year campaign for greater female visibility in sport last October, the players’ silence seemed a contradiction of everything that campaign stood for.
“You have these potential superstars in the making and it’s about promoting them and getting them out there and getting the public to know them and watch out for them,” he reflected. “And to know what they’re saying.
“So I was surprised to read that there were no players offered, because that’s a big component of international week. From the media perspective, there’s only so many articles you can actually write about a game without speaking to individuals and getting their angle on things.
“We need to know a little bit more about people to have a greater vested interest in them. So I think that’s something they need to be very mindful of. The more visible they are, the more we see them in papers and hear them on the radio in the car, the more likelihood we’re going to buy into it.”
It seemed especially puzzling given the rational, pragmatic tone adopted by those players who did speak to media in the immediate aftermath of that French hiding.
“That’s why it doesn’t make sense!” said O’Driscoll. “Having spoken to a couple of the ex-players like Fiona Steed and Niamh Briggs, the last thing this current crop want is to be patronised with ‘Well done, you tried your best!’
“They want to be critiqued like everybody else. They want constructive criticism that helps them identify what needs changing. So you’re going to get a level of honesty. They’re not hoodwinking themselves into believing that the performance against France was something that it wasn’t.
“They were honest, open and pretty stark about the reality of conceding over 50 points.”
The scale of that defeat reflected how, essentially, the Six Nations is a two-tier tournament in which both England and France, working off professional foundations, enjoy a monumental advantage over the rest.
And the challenge of reining in that advantage is what triggered this week’s question to Griggs.
For the majority of Ireland’s players, the Covid-enforced suspension of AIL activity for the last year meant that that French game was only their second competitive fixture in 10 months.
Oddly, not one of the 10 AIL clubs is represented on the IRFU Women’s Committee, nor – bizarrely – is the Union’s director of women’s rugby Anthony Eddy.
In that context, it seemed entirely pertinent this week to be asking who precisely is in charge of shaping a workable future for the women’s game here, be that in professional, semi-professional or resolutely amateur form. Especially so given the recent appointment of Ireland’s most-capped player, Lynne Cantwell, to run South African rugby’s female high-performance unit.
An opportunity surely missed by the IRFU?
“Yeah, I think so, absolutely,” agreed O’Driscoll. “Maybe the only upside to seeing Lynne go down to South Africa is the CV that she’s potentially going to get and that her passion, hopefully, will be working with Ireland in the future.
“She will come back with greater knowledge, she’s very well respected anyway and it appears, on the face of it, that she would have done a very good job in our set-up.”
The simplistic view is that Ireland needs a professional model for the women’s game now but, as Steed candidly suggested in a radio interview this week, identifying 30 players currently worthy of professional contracts might not be that simple a compute. And even if they were identified, would they want to suspend their current careers in service to rugby?
O’Driscoll is in full agreement with Steed.
“I do think it massively comes down to the financial situation of where the IRFU is,” he suggested. “If Covid hadn’t happened, would there be a timeline on trying to get to semi-professional or professional?
“I think you have to wait for the resources underneath the grassroots and for that pipeline to create a big enough group of players for that to be justified.
“On Fiona’s point, if you’re picking 30 players to be professional . . . like I’ve no idea who the extra people outside of the 23 are. And who are the 30 or 40 who are going to put pressure on those initial 30? So I think the standard probably has to increase. There has to be a bigger player pool.
“But then you’re dealing with the financial implications of the IRFU and other unions just in survival mode at the minute. So it feels like we almost have to take a breath to get through Covid and see what the state of play financially is at the other end.
“Then reassess what the plan needs to be over the next four or five years, be that stay amateur or be it a progression to get to semi-pro.
“And it depends too on what the appetite is like amongst these women as to whether they want to forego their careers for reduced income in many cases. So there’s many different factors at play here.”
There was much evidence of defensive naivety in the performance against France and a concern of O’Driscoll’s is that there wasn’t enough evidence of on-field repair. This could, in part, be attributed to some players being more schooled in sevens rugby and still acclimatising to the tactical discipline required for the XV-a-side game.
But there was a sense, too, of mistakes being needlessly repeated.
“You’ve got to learn from your mistakes on the hoof,” he stressed. “And you’ve got to have an ability from a coaching ticket, but also from a player problem-solving point of view, to fix things out on the park.
“I think from a defensive naivety point of view, they could probably be a bit more aggressive in their line-speed. That was one area that France showed real intent, they weren’t drifting at all. Maybe they felt they could close the gate out wide before Ireland had the skill-set to get it out to Beibhinn Parsons.
“We saw how infrequently she got the ball. You look at the top teams and the foundation of any big performance is who defends better?”
With Italy to be faced again in World Cup qualifying later this year, Saturday’s game is undoubtedly freighted with added pressure for this Irish team now. O’Driscoll, though, is unperturbed.
“I think these girls want that pressure, I think they would encourage it,” he said. “That’s what comes with increased exposure. One comes with the other. Some people will tighten up when that happens and you’ll get to understand how they’re made up. Some will thrive in that environment.
“So it’s about trying to identify who will be there for the future, who is going to be there for the fight.
“The important thing about criticism is not to make it personal. If we just say ‘Ah, they tried their best . . .’ they don’t want that. ‘Ah, she gave a good account of herself . . .’ No.”
And the long-term impact of this week’s tension?
“Unfortunately, sometimes you nearly need to be embarrassed by not having the answers to some questions to be forced into change” said O’Driscoll. “And maybe that’s the place we’re at now in terms of getting people to react to tricky and sometimes simplistic questions.
“It kind of kicks them into gear. The pathways have been an issue. There were going to be more interprovincials that obviously have fallen by the wayside in the last year. More opportunity to play higher-end games.
“But the reality is it felt so stagnant the last year, it’s kind of hard to know where the next progression is.”
Brian O’Driscoll was speaking as part of the Guinness #NeverSettle campaign, as Guinness pledges to Never Settle until everyone belongs in rugby
