Brian O'Driscoll urges Ireland women to make the most of World Cup opportunity
Brian O’Driscoll and Lynne Cantwell team up to celebrate Defender as Principal Partner for the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025. Pic: Sasko Lazarov / Photocall Ireland.
Brian O’Driscoll has been here. Four times, to be exact. Playing the waiting game.
Over eleven weeks have come and gone since the Ireland women’s team started their prep for a World Cup that, for them, will finally get going on Sunday in Northampton.
The gruelling pre-season is behind them, so too their pair of warm-up games. The edge that comes with squad selection passed last Monday week, the giddiness of the kit selection and the flight to England is in the rear-view mirror.
This week will mirror the daily schedule of any other match week, but it’s not the same. This is a World Cup and O’Driscoll’s advice is for the 32 players to enjoy it, and to make sure that they see it not as a stress but as the opportunity of a lifetime.
“You get to play for your country in a World Cup and you want to deliver your best performance and back yourself and believe in yourself. Enjoy it all, not just the games, but being in another country, in each other’s company, at a World Cup.
“There’s going to be great support in the UK. The England team is on a real high, there will be huge numbers attending the games, so enjoy all the adulation and the autographs and the pictures and all that comes with it. It is the time of your life, it really is.”
None of his four experiences ended as he would have wanted and, if that colours his own memories of global get togethers, then he still has a lasting fondness for the tournaments in Australia in 2003 and New Zealand eight years later.
“Great times. It was just such a shame in 2011 especially that the result didn’t match the feel, how tight we were. We had such a laugh, we really did.”
This is new ground for most of Scott Bemand’s squad.
Only Cliodhna Moloney-MacDonald has played at a World Cup before and that was eight years ago. Bemand himself has said lately that the Australian hosting in 2029 was uppermost in his mind when taking this job.
The job he has done since has been sterling with a Six Nations wooden spoon before arrival in the spring of 2023 magicking into a shock defeat of the world champion Black Ferns at the WXV1s in the autumn of 2024.
The form guide since has been mixed with heavy defeats to England and Canada, a what-if defeat to France and a poor loss to Scotland offset by some encouraging patches in all of those games and a few wins elsewhere.
Even so, O’Driscoll has been surprised by the speed of the upswing on the back of a chapter where they failed to make the 2021 World Cup and dozens of players past and present wrote to government to criticise the IRFU’s handling of the women’s game.
“Yeah, I am a bit. I was part of the Rugby World Cup board for that last cycle and I was down at that incredible World Cup final in Auckland between New Zealand and England and it hits you that we’re not a part of all this.
“As a player, you know that the Six Nations is huge but World Cups are where you want to pitch yourself and if you have to wait eight years for that then it is a long time, so it’s impressive how far they’ve come now.
“I don’t want to get into that old territory of letters to government but I think credit to the IRFU and [CEO] Kevin Potts in turning it around. And they got Scott Bemand to come in and deliver confidence and belief.
“The messaging has been good and then the emergence of some big players coming through, particularly the likes of Aoife Wafer coming through and showing what she is capable of. So it’s been kind of multifaceted, but it’s a pleasant surprise.”
There isn’t any sugar-coating here.
Ask him to rate the team in a wider context and he speaks of the “big gulf” between the top sides and the mezzanine level below where Ireland sit. But he does see evidence of a growing strength in depth in the global game.
Recent tournaments have thrown up mesmeric deciders and a few good semi-finals but too many pool games with yawning disparities. All of which is familiar to anyone who has watched the same stages of the men’s tournament down the years.
“You think about Japan being beaten 145-17 by New Zealand when Marc Ellis scored six tries and I don’t know if he ever played for the All Blacks again. That’s an iteration of where the game is going.
“It takes time for different sides to become competitive and garner belief and for all the factors at play to get them to a competitive place. So it does feel as though the women’s game is kind of where the men’s game was when it went professional 30 years ago.”
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