Nichola Fryday: 'There comes a time when you want to put your focus back on the important things'

CLUB FOCUS: Nichola Fryday poses for a photograph during the 2023 TikTok Women's Six Nations Media Launch.

Six months since Nichola Fryday announced her retirement from international rugby and the former Ireland captain remains committed to her exile as she concentrates on life in England and club commitments with Exeter Chiefs.

The loss of the Offaly woman was another blow for the women’s game in this country, coming as it did on the back of a failure to qualify for the last World Cup, sinking fortunes in the Six Nations, and ongoing debates and controversies about the women’s game.

Still only 28, she remains a key figure in the Exeter engine room as the south-coast club chases a maiden Premier XVs title, and her nomination as Rugby Writers of Ireland women’s player of the year last night speaks again for the abilities she still brings to bear.

“From the beginning, when I came up to Ireland, it was always going to be something that was an amazing experience, but for me I feel it has to come to an end at some stage. I do have career goals that I want to push on with now.

“Everything outside of rugby as well: all those years of not making weddings or birthdays or your family side of things. There comes a time when you want to put your focus back on those things and it may be a bit selfish because I am still quite early in my playing career but I feel like I have given everything that I could do to Ireland.

“Now it’s about putting the focus back on all the people that supported me throughout those years and giving everything to them that they gave to me. My career side of things I do want to focus on as well. I am really starting to focus on myself for a few years.” This week’s Rugby Writers award is almost a seal on that, a lovely coda to a career that produced 34 caps stretching back to her debut against Canada in 2016, and a means of reflecting on a journey that started almost by accident.

Fryday thinks back to her days in boarding school and how she wandered down to the rugby club in Tullamore in an attempt to strengthen connections with a local community that was at a remove while she was away at her studies.

The friends she made then remain close to this day but it led to much more again. She started to think about Connacht honours early on and was only a few sessions there when an Ireland team she hardly knew existed before first appeared on her radar.

“So it really is crazy when I look back at everything that has come since then.” There were plenty of dark days. She failed to make the squad for the 2017 World Cup and eventually without making the global tournament after Ireland fell short at a disastrous qualifying event in Italy two years ago.

There were second- and third-place finishes in the Six Nations and some standout wins along the way in the annual tournament but she finds herself landing on the November series win over the USA in 2021 when asked for her fondest memory in green.

Ciara Griffin was playing her second-last game and a side that had so recently faltered in that World Cup bid stood fast and claimed a gritty 20-10 win against the USA shortly after Cliodhna Moloney had publicly called out IRFI Director of Women’s Rugby Anthony Eddy.

Difficult a period as that was, the loss of all five games in the 2023 Six Nations may well have been a new low but Fryday is confident that Ireland can regain lost ground now that players have had a year with inaugural IRFU XVs contracts under their belts.

“We are at that stage where we will start to catch up and we have to start to catch up, otherwise we will get left behind. The Celtic [Challenge] tournament that is happening at the moment, you have seen the results.

“The fact that there are two [Irish] teams is giving girls exposure to a higher level of rugby that they haven’t had before so that can only be seen as a positive. The next year or two will take a lot of hard work but I know that the group of girls that are there are capable of it and can do it.”