Ireland women need more numbers to add up in this Six Nations

NEED MORE NUMBERS: Ireland's Aoife Wafer dejected after the final whistle. Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady

For all its romance and the unpredictable beauty, so much in sport comes down to numbers. The bald truth for women’s rugby in Ireland is that too many of them are taking too long to add up.

The national team’s aching six-point loss to Italy in the RDS on Sunday chalked up a sixth straight loss in the Six Nations and the 27 handling errors committed by Scott Bemand’s side spoke loudly for the road that has still to be travelled.

Other numbers run deeper.

The eight players on Ireland’s bench boasted an average of just over seven caps. The same figure for the starting XV was 17. The squad has seen its fair share of comings and goings and yet it retains a large scattering of players still wet behind the ears.

Building strength in depth is a challenge at all levels of the pyramid.

The IRFU listed just 1,341 adult female players back in October of 2018. That has since risen to 3,212 but the last strategic plan for the women’s game had targeted something over 5,000 by the end of 2023.

It’s still a small tribe, basically, so it’s heartening to see families like the Wafers in Ballygarrett in Wexford supply not one but two players to the cause with Aoife starring for the senior Ireland side at the weekend and younger sister Orla scoring a try for Blackrock.

“Yeah, she will be taking my spot in the back row soon, won’t she? Orla is class,” said Aoife. “She got her first AIL start there against Ballincollig. She has been doing really well, she is only 18 and hopefully she will get a shot with the U20s this year.”

The older sibling is still only a handful of caps into her own Test career but she sandwiched her 21st birthday with a try against France in Le Mans and a barnstorming effort with ball in hand against Italy two days ago.

Wafer admitted that it was enjoyable ‘bashing a few backs’ but there was an interesting take on how existing strengths are being utilised when talk turned to the collective and her own switch from openside to No.8 for Ireland’s attacking scrums.

“It was Scott’s [Bemand, the head coach] call. We’re very honest with ourselves as a team and we know what our super-strengths are. So we know that Brit [Brittany Hogan] is an absolute menace when it comes to breakdown work.

“She’s class on the flank and when we get that ruck ball she’s in there like lightning. She’s rapid. I’ve really enjoyed going into attacking [No]8. It’s something that I’ve kind of added to my game recently.

“The first time I would have tried it is against Clovers with the Wolfhounds when I got a little break. It’s pretty cool that we can just play to our super-strengths and just be really honest with each other and say, ‘yeah, you’re better at this, you go there’.” 

Maximising those resources will be a huge part of Ireland’s journey for the rest of this Six Nations as they face into a round three encounter with Wales in Cork next Saturday week having lost their opening pair of fixtures against the French and Italy.

Wafer was among the players and staff to make all the right noises after the Italian reversal. She spoke of the need to take responsibility, to ‘own’ the result and the performance that delivered it, and the ‘tough talks’ that await.

Just flushing Sunday’s loss from the system will be a job in itself. “It’s a bitter one, isn’t it?” she admitted. The long and the short of it is that Ireland have a lot to fine-tune on both sides of the ball after rounds one and two.

If their inability to mind the ball in attack was the standout feature of their second tournament loss then the ease with which Italy got over for some of their four tries was equally complicit in losing a game that was there to win.

“It was probably just we were a bit too hungry to try and get at the ruck maybe,” said Wafer. “We had said it a few times and it's just that eagerness to really get the ball back when maybe we should look at just fanning out.

“There was only that very small number of missed tackles (17 from 166). We should really just get up in their faces and push them back and make them go backwards because if you make a team go backwards they’ll just kick you back the ball.”