Aoife Wafer: 'As a kid growing up I dreamed of beating the Black Ferns'

Player of the Match Aoife Wafer scored two tries as her dreams of beating New Zealand come through.

DREAMS COME TRUE: Ireland’s Aoife Wafer is presented with the player of the match award. Picture: ©INPHO/Travis Prior

Head coach Scott Bemand has described Ireland’s shock defeat of New Zealand’s world champions as a “step in the right direction”. Aoife Wafer, the blindside flanker who did so much to make it happen, framed the WXV1 win in a much more historic light.

“It’s pretty indescribable, to be honest,” said the woman from Ballygarrett in rural Wexford. “It’s going to take a little while for this one to set in and we still have a few big weeks ahead, we’re competing in WXV1 and we still have to play Canada and the USA.

“But as a kid growing up in rugby, I have dreamed of this day. I dreamed of facing the haka, dreamed of beating the All Blacks and the Black Ferns, and we have done that here today so, yeah, I’m so proud of everyone in our squad.” 

Wafer found her way over the try line twice in the opening half of this tournament opener in the BC Place in Vancouver. In what was just her ninth cap, she was the standout player on the pitch, the vanguard in what was a superb all-round team performance.

Erin King, five months her junior, still only 20 years of age and with just the one cap to her name before this, scored another two tries, The second of them pulled Ireland level with less than two minutes to go and set up Dannah O’Brien for the winning conversion.

Bemand described both players as up-and-coming “superstars” while spreading the praise around liberally through a squad whose progress under him has been obvious but still lost a Six Nations match 88-10 to England last spring.

“It’s an important step,” said Bemand. “We always talk about keeping the momentum going. We wanted to be, first and foremost, a really hard team to play against and at 60 minutes when we were in it I think we started to believe more and more.

“Obviously they came out pretty fast and there was a bit of hanging on to start with but when we adapted to the pace of it I think we really started to believe in what we were doing behind the scenes and in how that translates into what we do on the pitch.

“Examples would be that we managed to put them into their half and defended with our lives inside their half, so we’re building minutes and important moments within games which feeds the evidence and which feeds the confidence bank. We’re getting there.” That they are.

New Zealand opened the scoring after nine minutes and such was the lopsided nature of the pre-match predictions that you would have feared for Ireland at that point. Instead, they knuckled down and played themselves into the game.

Three tries by half-time, the third of the coming from Neve Jones, gave them a solid footing. Even the loss to the sinbin of Niamh O’Dowd on 51 minutes didn’t deter them. The Black Ferns managed just three points while she was absent.

“We said we wanted to fire shots,” said Bemand.

They did just that, scoring five tries in all and setting themselves up for the next two weeks when they will face a host team in Canada that beat New Zealand in the Pacific Four Series in Christchurch last May and a USA side that may now look the weakest in the group.

It’s an astonishing turnaround for an Ireland team that was left holding the Six Nations wooden spoon in 2023 but has since posted a third-place finish in the 2024 version which qualified them for this top-tier WXV event and a place in next year’s World Cup.

Maybe the most obvious way of framing the progress is in the fact that they were playing third-tier WXV3 this time last year and opening their account by posting over a hundred points on Kazakhstan in the Middle East.

There were fears for them in Canada this time. Unfounded fears, as it turns out.

“The minute the opportunity came we were like, ‘absolutely, we deserve to be up with the best’,” said captain Edel McMahon. That’s where we want to challenge ourselves because we know we have a World Cup to compete in and this is the platform we get to show the world that we can.”