Irish Rugby confirm Vikki Wall contract with seven's programme

The IRFU’s head of women’s development and pathways, Gillian McDarby, has spoken about the lengths the union is going to attract more players from a GAA background but they have been circling around all Irish sporting waters for some time now.

Fri, 29 Sep, 2023 - 07:09

Brendan O'Brien

Sevens rugby, like so many of our Olympic sports, operates at a distance. Most Irish sports fans have never seen Kellie Harrington fight in the flesh, or Paul O’Donovan glide over water. How much can we really understand about what they do if that is the case?

Vikki Wall made her name performing on the field for Meath in front of thousands of spectators but she existed at a remove when accepting a two-year AFL deal with North Melbourne and now she has thrown her lot in with the IRFU.

The union confirmed yesterday that she is now a contracted player with their sevens programme and that she will see action at preparatory tournaments in Spain and France in the near future as she chases her dream of playing at the Paris 2024 Olympics.

Her experience switching codes from Gaelic games to Aussie Rules will surely stand to her as she starts afresh on another new page, but what exactly is the ask in front of her as she tries to master a new sport in the space of under a year?

The most passive of observer can tell that it’s a game that requires incredible fitness and stamina, a wide set of skills and a ferocious concentration, but an academic paper from 2019 gives us a deeper look inside the minds and bodies of those athletes.

Ninette Kruyt and Heinrich Grobbelaar’s ‘Psychological Demands of International Rugby Sevens and Well-Being Needs of Elite South African Players’ spoke to a number of players and some of the responses were eye-catching.

Sevens tournaments can task players with three games in the one day. And another three the day after. The periods in between matches are crammed with recovery, nutrition, video analysis and so much else besides. It’s a punishing schedule.

“The next morning you feel like you ran in front of a train and you know there are three more games to come,” said one player.

Another respondent stressed the need for mental strength as much as anything else and went so far as to claim that a number of the Springbok players who won a World Cup in XVs that same year vowed never to play sevens again as it was too demanding.

“The room for error is tiny,” said another. “One mistake and you probably lose a game.”

It wouldn’t be any surprise to find a similar study on the demands in AFL but the bottom line here is that women’s sevens is a worldwide pursuit being funded by national Olympic committees desperate for success and the standard is sky-high.

Hannah Tyrell made the switch from GAA to rugby XVs back in 2014, succeeded in the new code and then returned to win an All-Ireland football title with Dublin, and she gave an interesting take on the Vikki Wall move when speaking to hersport.ie recently.

She has no doubt but that the Meath legend has the athletic attributes to master the new game but pointed out the demands, both mental and physical, that come with all this. It is, Tyrell remarked, a ‘big ask’ even for someone as talented as Wall to nail this.

Athletes have been approached from a variety of different sports, including athletics, hockey and racket sports, and the competition among players to make their mark and earn a spot on the squad was described by one candidate as “cut-throat” earlier this year.

The existing squad will be hard to crack too.

Ireland have already qualified for Paris next year and it is only a handful of months since the Republic of Ireland women’s soccer team drafted in a number of ex-pats for their World Cup in a move that created some rumblings of discontent at the time.

One thing is for sure, if a player with Wall’s talents and visibility can do enough to earn her spot at the Olympic Games it would be a major win-win for the IRFU on and off the pitch.