Scott Bemand: Ireland will learn from England drubbing to bounce back against Scotland

Ireland Head Coach Scott Bemand speaks to the team huddle after the game. Pic Credit: Ben Brady, Inpho.

Ireland women’s coach Scott Bemand insists his side will take lessons from their 88-10 drubbing against the Red Roses.

The girls in green were subject to a shellacking in Twickenham on Saturday afternoon as they conceded 14 tries to a ruthless and relentless England.

Third place at this year's Women’s Six Nations means automatic qualification for the World Cup next year and with Scotland on the horizon, Bemand believes there’s no time for licking wounds as they go hunting for the coveted third spot.

“We’re a stable group, we’re an honest group, I think we’re all mature enough to admit that that wasn’t good enough. But they’ll be alright. As long as we can turn it around, take lessons from it and do something about it then we’re doing ok.

"We want this to feed players’ appetites for next week. I reckon we’ve got a dressing room full of people who are desperate to go and play that game straight away. I’d like to believe that we’ll get some bounce back from this.

"We’ll dust ourselves off but we’ll retain the confidence we’ve built over the last few weeks and hopefully we can put on a performance next week that people in Ireland can be proud of.”

There’s not much that can be said after such a one sided affair but it seemed that optimism was the order of the day for the former England women’s attack coach.

He spoke with a slight grin on his face throughout the post match presser which indicates he’s supremely confident in his team's ability to brush off the hammering and put in a performance in their upcoming test against the Scots.

“We came up against England who are probably the market leaders at the minute in world rugby, with an occasion that we’ve got to learn to play. We’ve got to dust ourselves down now and we’ll come back better for it next week.

“Once momentum started moving away from us, I think we probably looked a bit shellshocked. That’s fine. You see teams that went on to be very good teams that needed to learn to play occasions, semi-finals, finals, big games.

"Today was a big game for a youthful group. Did we predict a margin as large as that? No, probably not. Unfortunately that’s just how it went.

“There’s some bits we could definitely control better in terms of momentum sliding away from you. I was speaking about the age profile of this group, the experience of this group, we’ll definitely take a lot away from this and now its about being confident enough to apply the same against Scotland next week.

“We had three weeks of positive momentum and then we had a blip, it depends how you approach it. I think we can put this to bed quite quickly and move on to the Scotland game.”