LAST UPDATE | 25 Aug 2021
WHEN LIFE IN Ireland for all intents and purposes ground to a halt just over a year ago, Ciara Griffin wasn’t sure what to do with herself.
The 27-year-old says the buzz of being at the top of the classroom in CBS Tralee, the primary school at which she teaches, is similar to that which she feels pre-match in the dressing room with Munster or Ireland, the rugby teams she captains. Last spring, those sensations were taken away indefinitely as schools shut their doors and the Women’s Six Nations was cancelled before its conclusion. The Women’s Interprovincial Series wasn’t played at all.
Griffin was no longer on her toes between A and B as she likes it, her commute reduced instead to a few metres as she attempted to lead both classroom and dressing rooms from her computer.
“Fair play to all the parents: that’s all I can say,” laughs Griffin, who will be back in school for a staff day tomorrow before taking her first class of the 2021/22 school season next Monday. “I take my hat off to them. It’s not easy, they didn’t sign up to be teachers. They did such a fantastic job with what was thrown at them in terms of online learning, getting their kids to log in for different classes, sending in work. It was a massive shift.”
Griffin’s swift acclimatisation to online teaching surely proved beneficial when she and her Ireland team-mates had to make a similar adaptation on the rugby front. With the Six Nations on hold, they first conferred over Zoom to keep spirits — and fitness levels — relatively high, an edict for which Griffin herself was partly responsible as captain. “At the start of the first lockdown, we did different challenges as a group, kind of keeping up that bit of competitiveness and morale up as a group and just touching base. And realising too that sometimes, you just want to switch off and spend time with your family, which was fine as well.
“So it was kind of just checking in with people and letting them know you’re there; that you’re always there if they need you, but giving them space as well so that they can enjoy their downtime.”
Thankfully, a year on, Ireland were able to finish a new Six Nations campaign, finishing third in a temporarily truncated format. Since June, they have been training hard towards September’s World Cup qualifiers in Italy, when only one out of the hosts, Ireland, Scotland and Spain will guarantee their place at next year’s big show in New Zealand. “We want to be faster and fitter than we were in the Six Nations”, Griffin says, “although it’s the same with every team.”
Reflecting on the heavy defeat to France in their de facto semi-final in the spring, Griffin reiterates much of the sentiment from within the camp at the time: “it wasn’t a strong performance from us as a group. There were a lot of individual errors — either system breakdowns or errors by us.”
Reflecting on some of the discourse from outside of the Ireland camp at that time, rhetoric that portrayed an almost two-tiered competition in which ‘semi-professional’ France and eventual champions England, fully pro, are making use of their financial edge to set standards unobtainable for the other four European nations, Griffin almost scoffs:
This is what my mindset always is: you can be a professional player, right, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still train and perform like a professional when you’re an amateur player. So, I’m a teacher but I’m professional in how I train for rugby, in how I prepare, in how I recover. I think it’s so important to get rid of that excuse. And I don’t want it to be used as an excuse because on any given day, you can beat any team in front of you once you score more and they score less. It’s simple — it’s once you do what you said you were going to do: make your tackles, make your hits, slow down your rucks, get your breakdowns, score your tries. Execute. If you do that enough in a game you can beat whoever’s in front of you.
“We can control how we train, how we prepare, how we perform. We can’t control what other teams have or other teams do.”
In reality, the disparity between supposed amateurism in Ireland’s case and supposed professionalism in France’s case (Les Bleus’ contracted players are paid roughly the same as Ireland’s contracted sevens players, some of whom overlap as XVs players, for context) is more deep-rooted than being an issue of player pay at surface level. The key difference is structural, with the domestic games in both France and England beginning to thrive and consequently churn out talent whereas the women’s AIL has been treated by the IRFU like an afterthought for years, as has the entire pathway — or lack thereof — from underage to senior women’s rugby.
“It’s something that does need to be looked at, the structure for the AIL,” Griffin says.
You need a competitive club structure. We need that. We need grassroots rugby. We need feeder systems coming through of underage teams, of young girls getting that experience and exposure from a young age. And then it’s not a big jump from underage to senior.
“Hopefully it is in the pipeline and they are looking into it”, Griffin adds, “because there are so many brilliant players around, younger players who need that confidence at club level, who need to get that exposure, and then it’s not so much of a massive jump. The jump from underage to senior — you know yourself: it is a gap that needs to be bridged. Hopefully that will be done down the line. It needs to be done soon.”
On the more immediate agenda for Griffin, however, is the Women’s Interprovincial Championship, with her own Munster kicking off their campaign away to Ulster at Kingspan Stadium at 17:00 this Saturday. (Connacht host Leinster at the Sportsground at 14:45 the same day, with both games to be televised live for the first time on TG4).
“It’s great to see the interpros finally on television — and the fact that there’s such a strong sponsor in Vodafone behind it,” Griffin says. “I think it’s going to be great for young girls to make the interpros, playing for Munster, more visually accessible, and I think it’s going to be great to showcase the rugby in the competition over the next three weeks.
“But the preparation for an interpro, a local derby, it’s class: that feeling [exists] whether it’s televised or not televised.
You’d play an interpro in the back field if you had to because that’s how much interpros mean. So it’s great it’s being televised for people to see the passion that goes into your provincial jersey but it’s still prepared for the same way, if that makes sense.
“For me, I just love… I love that Munster jersey. When I got my first senior cap, my first senior jersey, it was just amazing.
I think that’s what’s really special: it’s when you’re handed that jersey, you see that stag looking up at you, and those three crowns, and you’re like, ‘Right… This is what I’m playing for. This is what I’m protecting.’
“From the past interpros, it’s literally just being able to put on that jersey — and there’s that level, that feeling when you put it on. That’s my favourite part on a personal level.”
So, for now, all national-team friendships are on pause before the Irish squad meets up again in the same colours next month.
“You kind of have to flip the switch, I suppose, in a way? You know, fine, they’re your team-mates but they’re also your opposition this week. You can be great buddies, having the banter, but then when it comes to game time, work time, you have to execute.
“I suppose it’s the settings, as well. You might be best friends with a person [at provincial level] but they play for a separate club: you’re not going to back off a tackle. You’ve a job of work to do when you put on your jersey and you have to do it no matter who’s in front of you.
“And what I love about rugby is everything is left on the pitch. It’s not brought off the pitch into a different team or different setting. What happens on the pitch stays on the pitch, and that’s so important: it allows you to perform hard but then recover and switch off and have that banter afterwards off the pitch.”
The Tackle Your Feelings Schools Programme is a classroom-based, teacher-led, life skills development programme which enables students to build healthy habits and personal coping strategies as well as kindness and understanding when it comes to mental health and wellbeing.
