'No one wants to lose 69-0. I got home and watched the game straight away, and watched it again the next night'

AS international debuts go it was the equivalent of being tossed into a lions’ den with just your bare hands for defence.

Thu, 28 Apr, 2022 - 08:05

Cliona Foley

AS international debuts go it was the equivalent of being tossed into a lions’ den with just your bare hands for defence.

Yet new Irish full-back Molly Scuffil-McCabe had plenty of support off-field last Sunday, particularly from one legendary player.

Fiona Coghlan used to teach her maths and PE in Lucan Community College and “every maths lesson it’d be ‘go on, down to the pitch, go join your local club’.”

Hockey and horse-riding were her previous sporting passions. She was so clueless in her first schools’ rugby blitz that, when she reached the try-line, she threw the ball over it instead of touching it down.

“I distinctly remember Fiona, with a back-pack on her, going ‘Noooooo! What are you doing?’”

They laugh about it now, and the 2013 Grand Slam captain’s initial prediction that Scuffil-McCabe would make a good loose forward.

She and Coghlan were texting before she faced England. “I said ‘to think you thought I could be a flanker!’ and she said ‘a good player is a good player’ so I took that as a compliment.”

Scuffil-McCabe’s progress typifies the limited experience and lifestyle of many of Ireland’s current cohort, which contrasts so dramatically to the professional status of growing numbers of their opponents.

She started rugby, in her mid-teens, with Garda Westmanstown RFC, spent two years contracted to the Irish Sevens and, when that didn’t work out, joined St Mary’s for a year before moving to Railway Union with whom she won an AIL medal this year.

“I enjoyed my time in Sevens and saw parts of the world I’d never have seen. but I had an overwhelming moment when I left, like ‘Oh God, I’m not going in training every day or as hard’.

Railway’, which now has its own gym and runs collective early morning S&C sessions for its players before they go to work, has a serious ‘high performance’ ethos, providing her with the ideal place to transition and blossom back in XVs.

“You get that hit of professionalism there. There’s 45 women all training on Tuesdays and Thursdays and playing in the AIL on Saturday and Leinster Division on Sunday but there’s still a club feeling too which is nice.”

If not for the happy accident of having Coghlan as her school teacher she might well have been lost to Irish rugby but, once pushed to try it, was quickly smitten.

“Everything I’d played before was largely non-contact so it was the contact element initially and the agility. I always used to play chase with the lads on the yard when we were little, earning my stripes.”

But, off field, she is juggling elite rugby with a career and, in her case, a second one.

She has just turned 24 and studied law but now works as a receptionist in a Dublin veterinary practice while trying to get back into college to retrain as a vet.

“I worked in legal services for two years. Then Covid hit, I lost my job and, like everyone, had a bit of a (life) moment. An opportunity came up in the veterinary field and I thought I just have to go for it, I was thinking about it too much.

“When I got a senior Sevens contract I was trying to balance it with law. Having finished my degree and left the Sevens programme I have a much better understanding of the balance you need to strike.”

While England’s pros could concentrate solely on physical recovery last Monday, Scuffil-McCabe and her teammates were all back at their day jobs or studies.

The loss of so many first-choice backs to the Sevens programme mid-season meant that she was really chucked into the deep end for her first cap but her reaction to that second-half mauling speaks volumes.

“I got home (on Sunday night) and watched the game straight away, and watched it again the next night. No one wants to lose 69-0. It’s hard to take but we’ve done our reviews.

“Now we’ve got to concentrate on what’s coming this weekend. We want to finish strong in front of a home crowd. As a group we’re going to park it now and look at the Scotland challenge.”