Ireland 'not daunted' as England plan World Cup homecoming in front of 75,000 crowd
Erin King during an Ireland Women's Rugby squad training session at the IRFU High Performance Centre in Dublin. Photo by Shauna Clinton/Sportsfile
It’s 22 years since an Ireland team ruined an English World Cup-winning team’s ‘homecoming’. Girvan Dempsey scored the visitors’ only try that day as the hosts went down to a first Twickenham loss in five years.
Maybe the more interesting comparison comes in the fact that there will be more people in that same stadium for Saturday’s Six Nations opener between the countries’ women’s teams than were there when Clive Woodward’s boys came up short in 2004.
The RFU is expecting a crowd of over 75,000 for England’s first game since claiming their World Cup title at the ground last September. It will be the most fans ever for a game in the women’s tournament and another sign of ongoing growth.
The task for Scott Bemand’s side is tougher than the one Eddie O’Sullivan faced back then. England haven’t lost a Six Nations game since 2018. That was in Grenoble. Their last home defeat in this tournament was three years earlier. France did the honours then too.
“It’s not an occasion that daunts this Ireland group,” said head coach Bemand.
That’s good. Ireland’s last experience of southwest London was an 88-10 loss in 2024 and it was no outlier. The scoring figures for and against England in the last four meetings read as 254-15. The gap has been enormous.
Last year’s first-half in Cork, which ended with Ireland just 7-5 in arrears, showed progress, and England are missing a good wedge of the players who won them that World Cup in 2025 through injuries, retirement and pregnancies.
No less than four are expectant mothers, Abby Dow has retired and Emily Scarrett has swapped a jersey for a role as attack and backs coach. Other stalwarts – Zoe Stratford and Tatyana Heard among them – are among the other absent faces.
All told, though, head coach John Mitchell can still call on 16 of the 23 that featured in that World Cup final win over Canada. He reeled off five possible replacements last week when asked about the loss of the prolific Dow.
They’ll be fine, like.
“They’re obviously going to go through a small piece of transition in terms of some of those players and opportunities,” said Bemand. “We come in with momentum. We come in with layers of experience [and] we should be excited about this” The visitors are without Amee-Leigh Costigan who is also pregnant, Edel McMahon who is injured and out for the season, as well as Sam Monaghan and Aoibheann Reilly whose fitness issues are of a short-term variety. Big losses that will be felt more keenly.
Still, Dorothy Wall and new captain Erin King do return having missed the World Cup and Aoife Wafer, who only made it back in time for the quarter-final loss to France, is another on board. All told, it’s still a strong but maturing Irish side.
Twelve of the 23 have just 20 caps or less. That includes are two rookies on the bench, but the experience of individuals and the collective is clearly growing. The front row of Ellena Perry, Cliodhna Maloney-MacDonald and Linda Djougang is especially wizened.
That’s good news given the job England did on the Irish scrum in Cork’s Virgin Media Park last year. Bemand insists the Irish setpiece is light years ahead of what it was then, and he is saying much the same about the collective since that World Cup.
The aim right now is to lean into that expanding core of nous across the squad while sprinkling in a bit of freshness. Vicky Elmes Kinlan who steps in for Costigan on the wing, has that in spades. “The perfect winger,” said Bemand.
“It's important to get new caps in there, fresh energy. Who's next? Who's the next player that's coming through? That's going to become the next Erin King, Aoife Wafer, Dannah O'Brien. Who's got that? Who's the next talent coming through?” That mix is more pronounced in the list of replacements where, for example, familiar front row hands like Neve Jones and Niamh O’Dowd are paired with the uncapped Eilis Cahill. Katie Whelan is the other newbie and Nancy McGillvray has played just three times.
Then again, Wafer and King have just 19 caps between them and they are already talismanic figures in this operation. Numbers like that suggest that there is still a lot of growth ahead for a side that will be eyeing three home wins in this year’s competition.
“I don't think we're at a point that we're ready to talk about how good our performance could be,” said the head coach. “We're on a pretty steep slope, aren't we? An upward trajectory. My job is to keep that as steep as we possibly can.” ENDS
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