‘I felt myself getting mentally drained’

When Dannah O’Brien banged over the conversion of Erin King’s late, late try against the Black Ferns in WXV1 in September, the scenes of delirium in the Irish camp befitted a side that made history.

This was their most seismic victory in years, a five-tries-to-three epic featuring two tries apiece from Erin King, the outstanding 21-year-old back-row, and Aoife Wafer, the brilliant 21-year-old openside. At 27-27, it all came down to O’Brien, the 21-year-old fly-half. When she put over the extras and won the Test, it immediately went down as one of the great Irish rugby moments of recent years.

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It was Ireland’s third victory in a row against a top-ten nation, the first time they’d put together a run like that since 2017, and it came off the back of an encouraging third-place finish in the Six Nations. The previous season they had been whitewashed. Before the year was out, there was more good news for the Ireland team, now under the astute coaching of Scott Bemand, a multiple Grand Slam-winning backs coach with England.

King followed in the footsteps of the great Ruby Tui to win the World Rugby Breakthrough Player of the Year award (see P80-83) and Wafer was named in the Dream Team of the Year. Collectively and individually, Ireland were on the up. This year is full of promise for them, a young and improving team with a core of experience heading into the Six Nations and the World Cup with a belief that hasn’t been there in a long time.

The rise and fall and possible rise again of the women’s team involves glory and despair and now, well, the excitement is in not knowing what this current group is capable of. Nobody would ever have imagined at the beginning of 2024 that Ireland would have the best breakthrough player on the globe or a member of the dream team.

The infamous event that sparked change

To get an angle on where the team is now, you really need to go back to where it once was – a Grand Slam side who once nilled England, a collection of driven individuals who merged beautifully as a team and made the semi-final of the World Cup – and then what it became when neglect set in. Back in 2012, an infamous event happened that sparked change.

Ireland were playing a Six Nations game in Pau in the South of France, but they couldn’t fly direct to Pau. So they flew to Paris and got caught up in rush-hour traffic heading across the city to catch a train which they had zero chance of catching. Their schedule was lunacy. Even if the roads were empty, the folk who booked their journey still hadn’t given nearly enough time for them to make their connection.

From there, a mad scramble ensued. Night-train tickets were booked on credit cards. Players were seated in random carriages. Few of them got any sleep. They asked for a later kick-off but were told there was no chance. They arrived in Pau early in the morning, hit their beds for two hours and then got woken and went out to play. They lost narrowly but, in a sense, they won. Because their story went public, there was a bit of an outcry about how they were treated and the IRFU vowed that such nonsense would never happen again.

The Ireland team travel to the match
Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan

“That was definitely a catalyst,” says the great Niamh Briggs, full-back on the Grand Slam team a year later and captain of the championship-winning side two years after that. “We had that chip on the shoulder, that togetherness. When I think back, it’s actually not even the stuff on the pitch, it’s the memories off it that are the fondest.

“We had some big characters in that group – Joy Neville, Lynne Cantwell, Fiona Coghlan, Alison Miller… We beat England 25-0 in the Grand Slam year. Alison scored a hat-trick in the first half.”

Miller laughs at the memory of it. Does she have a match ball? Of course not. Her jersey from the day? “No, we’d have to use that jersey again the next day. God knows where it is now.” Briggs takes up the story again. “We’d just come off an unbelievable World Cup experience in 2014, where we beat New Zealand (Miller scored again) and got to the semi-final. Then we won the Six Nations in 2015. I don’t think people talk about that enough. We should have won another Grand Slam that year. We were beating France in Ireland and the floodlights went out and by the time the game restarted we’d lost all our momentum. That was a great era.”

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Miller says the connection they had off the field yielded a huge return on it. “We had very strong-willed and high-performing people on that team. They didn’t take any BS.” Champions in 2015, Ireland then finished third and second in the seasons that followed. Lindsay Peat, an accomplished basketball player and a terrific and high-profile Gaelic footballer, turned her hand to rugby at that point. She was in her mid-30s and suddenly she was an Irish international.

“It was a tough transition,” she says. “It was tough to learn the game. It was tough to be with these amazing women who I’d watched on the telly because they were very talented players. It took me until I made a chop tackle on Sarah Hunter (one of the great England players) to go, ‘Oh, that’s great, I can actually do this’.

“Then in the 2017 Six Nations we won our first four games and it was fantastic, but it was hard. Other nations were moving ahead of us in terms of coaching and resources.” There was a World Cup in 2017 in Ireland. Amid huge hype, Ireland flopped and finished eighth after finishing fourth three years before. Miller remembers the slide only too well.

“You could see that the sevens was being absolutely favoured over 15s,” she says. “It was like the IRFU had two kids and they knew they should treat them the same, but all the love and the attention and the money was given to one over the other.

“Fifteens wasn’t being shown the care and respect that it once was shown. It was a bit neglected. In 2019 we won one Six Nations game and finished fifth, then there was a bit of a pick-up, then it was down again. Maybe the quality of players wasn’t what it had been, but at the same time they weren’t really given a chance.”

‘I felt myself getting mentally drained’

“Looking back,” says Briggs, “was the team best supported by the IRFU at the time? I’m not really sure they were. I felt myself getting mentally drained, trying to fight a lot of fires to try and protect the players.

“There was a lot of animosity between players and the union and it was just unfortunate. That playing group had to pave the way for this next generation of central-contracted, professional players and a high-performance setting in Dublin. It’s great to see but it was tough. It took a lot of trauma to get there.”

That trauma reached its zenith when Ireland failed to qualify for the 2021 Rugby World Cup (played in 2022 because of the pandemic). In a seismic moment, the players, past and present, wrote to the Government about their plight and what they felt was a status of second-class citizenship with the IRFU. The nuclear button had been pressed.

Irelands Alison Miller scores a try
Mandatory Credit ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan

“I genuinely think that that letter was a pivotal point for change and I have a lot of admiration for players that put their head above the parapet,” says Briggs. “We now have so much good happening in the game.”

“There are dark days for every team,” says Peat. “But the essence of life is to die, rebirth and live again. And when you rebirth you have to rebirth with changes to be better for the next life. And that’s what has happened.”

From the ashes has risen something impressive. “I’m very excited about where the game is here right now and really looking forward to seeing where it can go over the next few years,” says Briggs. “Irish women’s rugby needed someone just to put an arm around it and drive it from the inside and there are people doing that now.

“Bringing somebody in like Scott Bemand is very shrewd because he’s a born winner. He’s had more Six Nations titles than anybody else. I think he understands what it takes to win and he has no baggage.

“He had a huge amount of respect straightaway for everybody involved and he’s done it so well, just changed the mindset of these players to really believe they can play at the top tier.”

‘It’s going in the right direction’

Professional contracts, proper management, the sevens players made available to 15s, elite strength & conditioning, player identification, clear pathways, more time spent on the pitch – it’s all bubbling now.

“It’s going in the right direction,” says Briggs, who is now a national talent coach in Munster. “It’s not all roses. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that everything is amazing; the game still needs a lot of resources.”

“The famous letter was as a result of players not being able to take it anymore,” says Miller. “Change had to be forced but you look at the Erin Kings and Aoife Wafers and competition for places and professionalising the game and we’re in an exciting place.”

A chance to excel was all these players were looking for, says Peat. “A high-performance environment is what was needed and they’re getting it now.” Nobody is saying that this team is the finished article and nobody is understating the distance that the Irish set-up still has to travel. But the improvements are undeniable, the young players are appearing over the horizon and the buzz of before is returning.

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