IRELAND HEAD COACH Scott Bemand says he and his team want to be filling the Aviva Stadium for home games in the coming years, after ticket sales for next weekend’s Women’s Six Nations game against Scotland passed the 26,000 mark.

With over a week still to go until that clash with the Scots, the attendance in Dublin will smash the existing record of 9,206 for a home Ireland Women game.

That record was set just last month as Bemand’s beat Italy in Galway’s Dexcom Stadium, but next weekend at the Aviva will take things to a new level in Ireland’s first standalone women’s game at the Dublin venue.

Tomorrow’s home Six Nations game against Wales in Belfast will involve a considerably smaller crowd, with around 5,000 tickets sold for the game at the Affidea by Thursday afternoon.

Ulster play at home to the Stormers in the URC on Friday night, which naturally hasn’t helped ticket sales, while plenty of Irish rugby fans clearly targeted the Scotland clash in Dublin as the one to wait for.

Regardless, Ireland boss Bemand hopes his team can deliver a performance tomorrow in Belfast that makes even more people want to turn up the following weekend.

“Our home games are and continue to be really important for us,” said Bemand.

“We want to keep growing the spectacle, the performance. We want people on board. We want to fill stadiums. Once we can start breaking the back of getting 10,000 people regularly turning up to watch us…

“We’re obviously going to the Aviva. In a short while, we want to be talking about filling the place. So we want to keep people talking. We want to keep people excited about what we do.”

Bemand and his squad are pleased about the uptake for the Scotland game in Dublin, although the hope is that it’s only another rung on the ladder to something even bigger in the coming years.

“It’s class,” he said. “It’s a stepped process, isn’t it?

Ireland captain Erin King with fans in Galway. Dan Sheridan / INPHO Dan Sheridan / INPHO / INPHO

“It was the same with England when they were talking about playing standalone games at Twickenham. So we want to get people on board, we want to get people in through the door.

“We want to get a performance out there that people want to come back and look again, and hopefully we’re not talking about 25,000 or 26,000 for too long, and we can keep growing that number.”

And that’s the bottom line for Ireland – winning games and playing well. That’s what gets big crowds through the gates and coming back for more.

Ireland’s improvement in the last two years has been clear for all to see, but the losses away to England and France in this Six Nations were a disappointment for them.

Having torn Italy apart in their game in Galway last month, Ireland now plan to show their quality on home soil against Wales and Scotland.

“The home games are really massive for us,” said Bemand. “Certainly, the away games in this competition, going over to Twickenham and Clermont, were going to be two big Test matches.

“I think we acquitted ourselves well in those, but you’ve got to win your home games. In terms of where we are and where we want to get to, we’ve got to win these home games.

“We’re playing Wales and Scotland, two massive games, and we want to get our best out there. But from where we are as a group, we want to keep going after our performances, the processes of that.

“We’ve done that in training this week. The girls have backed up two unbelievable training days this week on the back of, we had one big day in the fallow week where they kind of parked the France result and got thinking about Wales.

“We’ve had three big days coming into this Test match. We’re ready for it. And what we’re going to do now is get our best performance out there and let the rugby do the talking.”