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Women’s game looks set for even more testing times ahead

After brief window opens on difficult challenges facing the sport, now it slams shut once again for all involved

Sene Naoupu of Ireland is tackled by Beatrice Rigoni and Michela Sillari of Italy during the Women's Six Nations Play-off match between Ireland and Italy at Energia Park. Photo: Matt Browne/Sportsfile

David Kelly Twitter Email

April 26 2021 02:30 AM

Not content with duking out the tensest of Guinness Six Nations finales on Saturday, England and France lock horns again this Friday.

And why not? Who knows when they may do so again.

This time there will be no trophies on offer. No TV cameras to broadcast the pictures live. They just want to play.

And then this briefest of novel international windows for this struggling sport will slam shut. It seems that nobody knows when the next international rugby game will take place.

A pretty remarkable sentence if you were involved in most other sports, even in the midst of a pandemic.

The problems within Irish women’s rugby may be plentiful but they do not exist in isolation as the global game remains in a state of flux.

While obviously afflicted by the pandemic, the ramifications have disproportionately affected a sport which was already gasping for oxygen in normal times.

Mirroring other sports, this is just another female version which has been less able to cope compared to its male counterpart.

And so having completed their month-long competitive campaign, their first series of uninterrupted matches in more than a year, the Irish women will take six weeks off to rest, recuperate and reflect.

And then they will return to regather for more training and even more uncertainty, the semi-professional Sevens players congregating not knowing when they will resume their globe-trotting endeavours, the fifteens players assembling on weekends with equally no immediate aims in sight.

“We are obviously going to have a World Cup qualifying campaign to come at some stage next season,” notes coach Adam Griggs of a challenge on a horizon that nobody can yet see.

Sene Naoupu thinks it may be in September.

“That’s going to be really important,” adds Griggs of a qualifying campaign which, like two championships and the World Cup itself, have already suffered anxiety-inducing postponements.

He believes he will still have his Sevens players unless the world series miraculously springs into his life and that is a good thing because most of the break-out stars in his squad were hewn from this currently suspended project, with some fifteens players ignored for the very reason that it doesn’t make sense to have paid players lying idle.

It has been largely fruitful, if unplanned and unwittingly so.

“I’ve obviously worked very closely with Anthony (Eddy, director of women’s rugby) and we have a plan laid out for them. They will take some time off.

“Unlike our fifteens players, they are able to go back into their Sevens programme now. And so they will rejoin that group once they have had some downtime and resume with the Sevens. And once we re-assemble, they will come back to us when we bring in the wider squad.”

And yet nobody knows when they will line up again for an anthem.

Viewed through a parochial prism, Ireland can reflect on achieving their stated ambition of finishing third, topping the amateur ranks, but marooned behind the ever-accelerating French and English in the abridged Six Nations.

A brief résumé of a campaign featuring a hotch-potch of fifteens stalwarts and hastily converted Sevens players reveals a surfeit of individual commitment and occasionally no little quality but, perhaps understandably, an unsustainable consistency amongst the collective.

A tonking of a hapless Wales produced their best half of rugby but also one of their worst, then a predictable mish-mash of a mismatch against France, before a torrid win against Italy where they were mostly defiant off the ball and yet predominantly dismal on it.

Privately, they will have been aware of what they could realistically achieve given 20 weeks of weekend training which can prepare you physically for competition but is an uncertain illustration of technical ability.

Saturday was an obvious illustration as Ireland defended doughtily yet were just as guilty as the slipshod Italians in being effective at securing possession in a game that featured more than 50 turnovers in a variety of circumstances.

“Something for us is just their core skills work,” says Griggs.

“You can’t underestimate good passing out in front of players, obviously being able to take a ball in, making sure you make your one-on-one tackles, you’re accurate at your breakdown and clean-out.

“It’s all those core skills that we need. And then when we come back together, we add that back into the collective.

“And if every player comes into the squad with that level of core skills, then we can start to push on as a whole collective group.”

For a devotee of the sport, it was still a good day for the Irish; for a neutral observer, it was anything but, an illustration of an entire tournament that featured only one meaningful contest worthy of the name.

A competition still, remarkably, without a title sponsor, will not exactly have the ponytailed marketing gurus beating down on their door on the evidence of the last month’s fare, a sad reflection on the commitment of those involved but also a realistic one.

The IRFU’s belated commitment to a domestic league, arriving ten years too late say most, will commence the process of providing matches for their fifteens players but, with three clubs far stronger than the rest in a ten-team league, it will not be a silver bullet given the lack of numbers.

“Getting our clubs back out and getting players back out would be great so we can find players to play for Ireland,” says Dorothy Wall, one of those break-out Sevens stars who have transferred and played well, but just not enough.

“It is a big struggle at the moment because only the international set-ups are playing.”

They will have enjoyed it while it lasted. And now the rest of the sporting world will continue without them.

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