WHEN SCOTT BEMAND was appointed as head coach of the Ireland women’s rugby team last summer, one of the first tasks he had on his hands was to select a new captain for the side.
Having led the team throughout a difficult 2023 Six Nations campaign that saw them finishing at the foot of the Championship table, Nichola Fryday made the decision to retire from international duty. Yet instead of choosing a single player to take over from the Offaly native, Bemand elected to give Fryday’s former second-row partner Sam Monaghan and Edel McMahon the opportunity to captain Ireland in a joint-capacity.
A debutant in a World Cup qualifier against Spain back in September 2021 at 28 years of age, Navan native Monaghan has established herself as an important player across the 18 Ireland caps she has accumulated to date.
Yet even though it is Monaghan and McMahon who have been tasked with leading the side forward – they were already in their respective roles for the successful march towards the inaugural WXV 3 crown in Dubai last October – Monaghan has insisted they aren’t the only commanding voices in the Ireland squad.
“You definitely have to think a lot differently. I think I was definitely a greenhorn coming into this a couple of years ago, I hadn’t played much rugby. Now all of a sudden you’ve 40 players looking at you to make a decision. The great thing about this is we’re growing the leadership across a lot of the players, so we’ve so many experienced players,” Monaghan remarked at an Irish press conference on Tuesday.
“Dorothy [Wall] was on before me, Hannah O’Connor, Lauren Delany, Enya Breen. So many other names, so it’s not just on myself and Tricky [Edel McMahon]. It’s throughout the whole squad as well.”
When you consider they were previously team-mates at Wasps in England’s Premiership Women’s Rugby, Monaghan and McMahon seemed like ideal choices for the co-captaincy under Bemand’s watch.
They first became properly acquainted when Monaghan joined Wasps in 2020, but as the former Meath ladies footballer explains, the duo had been moving in similar circles for quite some time.
“Tricky actually,” Monaghan responded when asked if she had come up against any of the Irish squad on a Gaelic football field.
“She was playing for Clare. There might be a picture of us somewhere, we didn’t know each other at all. Actually, we were in college together and we were living two blocks down from each other and never even knew each other. She was playing rugby and I was playing football. Then we met at Wasps. We were destined to meet at some point!”
Of course, Monaghan isn’t the only one within the current Irish women’s rugby system to have featured for Meath at the highest level of inter-county football.
A two-time All-Ireland Senior Football Championship winner with the Royals, Vikki Wall joined the IRFU’s Sevens programme as a centrally contracted player last August and made her debut for Ireland at the Perth leg of the HSBC World Rugby Sevens Series back in January.
When Monaghan was playing alongside the Dunboyne woman in the colours of Meath during the 2015 inter-county championship, she never could have envisaged that they would both go on to represent Ireland in rugby – albeit in two separate variants of the sport.
“I actually went, when I was playing Gaelic football for Meath, to a [rugby] session in Navan and I was like ‘why do they keep kicking the ball away!?’ It was driving me mad, so I went back to basketball and football,” Monaghan recalled of her first encounter with rugby.
“It’s amazing and it’s amazing for Vikki as well, getting that experience is great with the year coming up to it in the Olympics. Maybe some day we’d get to put on the jersey together. She’s a phenomenal player and a phenomenal athlete, and an even better person. To see her do so well is great.”