One player per province to link up with Irish men's sevens squad ahead of Olympics

OPTION? Ireland's Hugo Keenan (right) is tackled by South Africa's Jesse Kriel during the Rugby World Cup 2023. Pic: Bradley Collyer/PA Wire.

The IRFU has reached an agreement to release a men’s player from each of the four provinces to join the Olympic men’s sevens squad ahead of next year’s Summer Games in Paris, the governing body’s performance director announced on Thursday.

David Nucifora’s final act of his 10-year tenure as Irish Rugby’s first overseer of its high-performance programme will be to lead the men’s and women’s squads in the French capital before handing the reins to successor David Humphreys.

First-choice Ireland men’s XV full-back Hugo Keenan is one of a number of Andy Farrell’s potential post-World Cup squad members with Sevens experience, alongside Munster wing Shane Daly and Ulster wing Rob Baloucoune, Leinster flanker Will Connors and Connacht wing Andrew Smith, though Nucifora explained any player taken from the provinces would need to with the agreement of both player and his head coach.

“With regards to the Olympics with our Sevens teams, qualification last summer gives both our Men’s and Women’s programmes a full 12 months to prepare for the Olympics,” Nucifora said. 

“It will probably give the Irish Olympic team the largest squad they’ve ever taken to an Olympics.

“With regards to the Men’s Sevens, we’ve reached an agreement with the provinces that we will have the ability to select one contracted player from each province for the Olympics. That will be done in agreement with the player. 

"More than likely that player will be a player that has come through the Sevens programme at some stage, so they’re familiar with the game, and it will also be a fact that we’ll work with the province and the player and look to integrate that player, or players, in the back-end of this season to be able to see where they fit and whether they can earn their selection in the Olympic squad, which will probably be named in late June/early July.

“The squad at the moment is already very strong, for those of you who saw the performance at the weekend down in Cape Town, the men beat New Zealand for the first time and lost the bronze medal match against Fiji. So already they are there or thereabouts and have a very strong squad.

“So any players we look to bring in will have to be people that we think can add value significantly to the current squad.” 

Nucifora did not mention any names being discussed for release by their provincial head coaches but insisted selection would not preclude any of them being available for Ireland’s Six Nations title defence in February and March.

“They’d still certainly be playing the Six Nations if they were selected. The lead-in time would look at how it affects and works in with their provincial requirements at the moment so it might be that a player might come and play a tournament, one of the World Series tournaments prior to the end and then go back into provincial rugby, then come back again. It will just be a management scenario of how we look at each player and each provincial team, how we might do that.

“Then we’ll make a decision on how many of those eligible players, we’re looking at a maximum of four, we might take none, we might take four. I suppose that’s something we’ve just got to work out, who can add value to the group, helping us towards winning an Olympic gold medal.” 

While Nucifora highlighted the Sevens programme as well as explaining the ongoing review into the Men’s XV’s World Cup campaign, which ended in another failure to reach the semi-finals for the first time, the IRFU performance director made only a passing reference to the otherwise much-discussed Ireland Women’s XV, which failed to qualify for the Covid-delayed 2021 World Cup, staged a year later and then ended the 2023 Six Nations with a whitewash of defeats and the wooden spoon.

“The Women's XV, a bit of a rebuild for us this year with Scott Bemand coming on board (as head coach after the Six Nations) for the World Cup, managing to win the WXV 3 competition. It's a launchpad for where we get to in the Six Nations for the Womens's XVs."