THE IRELAND WOMEN’S team walked off the pitch following Sunday’s Six Nations defeat to Italy, and wondered ‘what-if?’
In front of a record crowd, Scott Bemand’s side dominated the territory battle (69%) at the RDS but were undone by their own inaccuracies, making a total of 27 handling errors across a disjointed, messy team performance.
On another day, it could have been a momentum-boosting victory for an Ireland team who went winless in last year’s Six Nations, but instead they were made to pay for their errors as they slipped to a 27-21 defeat.
With this week a break week in the competition, Ireland will focus on sharpening up their attacking game as they prepare to welcome Wales to Cork on 13 April.
The Italy performance certainly showed signs of progress from the opening round defeat in France, Ireland playing with much more ambition and width in attack, but Bemand’s team will need to be better if they are to avoid a third straight defeat when the Welsh come to town.
“Certainly our set-piece this week was very much improved,” says backrower Brittany Hogan.
“Our scrums, our lineout execution, we got a maul try, it was very much improved from our French week, that’s certainly an area [that was a positive].
“Our ambition in attack, we went to the edge a lot more, got Beibhinn [Parsons] onto the ball, Katie [Corrigan] onto the ball, so it’s just trying to make sure that we utilise those areas of the game, our strengths of our team, and that’s what gave us those exciting scores.
“We just need to make sure that we keep doing those. Whenever we get into the 22, just tighten up a wee bit.
It’s just the composure element, we have to make sure that whenever we’re there, we’re not the ones under pressure in our green zone.
“We’re 10, 20 meters from the tryline, that’s whenever Italy are under pressure, under the pump. We have to capitalise on that and make sure we stick to our system. If we have to slow it down, we need to slow it down, but we’re in control there. Going there, we have to be a little bit more composed in that area.”
Most of Ireland’s most galling errors came in the Italy 22, with the sight of Parsons dropping the ball with the tryline calling a moment that summed up their day.
Having started brightly, moving into a 7-0 lead, Ireland appeared to lose confidence as the game wore on, their error count rising as Italy continued to make the most of their own limited opportunities to strike.
Hogan was Ireland’s top tackler on the day with 15, also beating two defenders and making one made clean break in a typically relentless performance. Yet the Ulster player admits that as Ireland struggled for cohesion, it became increasingly difficult to settle into their attacking rhythm.
“Whenever you’re looking up and you keep getting hit behind the gainline it’s hard to change that because you’ve got no backfield to get yourself out of it, you’ve got no way to put them under pressure again.
“So it’s kind of, we just need to compose ourselves. Like, the pressure is on them, we’re on their 22, so we just need to compose ourselves and we didn’t do that.
“We were still a wee bit frantic in our own 22, the unforced errors etc, so I suppose we have to get much better at problem solving and getting good go-forward, so we don’t keep going backwards.
“We played in the right areas of the pitch, and whenever we got that go-forward, stretched and stretched, so whenever we got it to the edge we certainly stressed the Italians.
“You could tell on their defensive line we had created those gaps and created those opportunities, but just didn’t execute on them. But it was whenever we were in the 22, it was a little bit harder.
“I’m not 100% why, we just didn’t get our barrells and they wanted it a little bit more at the breakdown.
“We got the losing bonus point so at least we can take that positive out of the game but we were so close in it and we definitely deserved to have some more points on the board, it was just our execution in the 22 that lost us the game unfortunately.
“Overall, on a positive note, improvement from last week so we use that as a stepping stone, a new line in the grass and build for Wales.”
