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2025 Women's Six Nations: Can Ireland break the third-place ceiling?
By Anna Caplice
The 2025 Women’s Six Nations will be a massive tournament for Ireland. It’s been 10 years since we last won the trophy and so much has happened in the last decade in women’s rugby.
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For Ireland, however, is this finally the year that we can hope for a finish higher than third place? Disappointingly over time, this became the best result this team could have hoped for while other nations, who were once a very beatable opposition, invested more and more into women’s rugby.
After years of watching on in a helpless and stagnant state, is this the year that Ireland can finally break the third-place ceiling of the past ten years?
It’s interesting to look back at the results of the 2015 tournament and remind ourselves of the excitement when there wasn’t just one overly dominant team, and anybody could have beaten anybody.
In fact, anybody was beating anybody. Wales beat England 13-0, France beat Ireland 5-10 and Italy beat France 17-12. In fact, it was the first and only time that Italy denied somebody else a grand slam.
Ireland needed to beat Scotland by more than 27 points in the final game to win the trophy and ended up having an absolute try-fest just to erase any doubt of points difference and walloped Scotland 3-73.
From 2016 onwards, the trophy made one visit to France, but has otherwise stayed with England, who have been on a grand slam winning streak since 2018. Will this be the year that changes?
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Ireland will certainly not be shutting down that possibility as we know that this squad is very capable of serving an upset. The biggest question that Scott Bemand’s side will have to answer is: is this Irish form that rocked the WXV 1 competition by firstly qualifying for the tournament against the odds and then beating the Black Ferns in Vancouver on 30 September last year consistent?
It’s difficult to study the players’ current form as most of the Irish players do not find themselves among many of their Six Nations peers at club and regional level.
Premiership Women’s Rugby in England is a league showcasing players from all Six Nations countries, with Scotland, Wales and of course England squads most heavily represented across all nine PWR teams.
Ireland currently has only five players in the English league which is considered by most to be the best women’s domestic competition in the world.
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Only one current Irish player featured in the thrilling PWR final last weekend with Gloucester Hartpury hooker Neve Jones, known as an absolute nuisance for opposition to try and deal with, playing a blinder and bagging a third premiership medal in three years.
The rest of the Irish squad is occupied with the Celtic Challenge where the four Irish provinces are squashed into two teams to compete with regional teams from Scotland and Wales.
Both Irish teams dominated the tournament with the Wolfhounds winning the league with the Clovers coming in second. The biggest scoreline was 102 – 0 when the Wolfhounds beat Edinburgh leaving a few eyebrows raised about the quality of the competition in its current form.
New Welsh head coach Sean Lynn and Scottish head coach Bryan Easson both made reference to finding players for the future within the Celtic Challenge and grouping them in with the “age-grade” discoveries.
On the other hand, Scott Bemand has lauded the tournament for preparing his squad for the upcoming Six Nations. It was like reading about two entirely different competitions.
I must admit, I was worried at this same stage last year that the Celtic Challenge was not a hot enough pot to let the Irish players cook before the 2024 Six Nations. Having been happily proved wrong once, I am hopeful that this year’s worry is also misplaced.
There are two players that Irish fans will be excited to see back in green this weekend.
Erin King won World Rugby’s Women’s XV’s Breakthrough Player of the Year for 2024 and I’m excited to see how her form has grown since dedicating more time to her craft in fifteens after making the switch from Ireland Sevens.
Her Wolfhounds teammate Aoife Wafer was nominated for the Guinness Six Nations Player of the Tournament in 2024 and I’ll be damned if she isn’t one of the first names on this year’s shortlist if her epic form is to be continued.
Wafer definitely has the potential to get her name next to previous Irish nominees for World Rugby Player of the Year: Sophie Spence and Niamh Briggs. And if Ireland’s results go right, she might even be able to go one step further.
The biggest year for women’s rugby the world has ever seen kicks off on the international stage this weekend and in the first fixture of the tournament Ireland host France in Belfast.
The first question for this impressive and seemingly unafraid Irish side is about to be answered: Can they beat France?
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Can Ireland beat France? Yes. Will they beat France? No, I doubt it. Scotland will also be looking to beat France but I don’t think they will do it either. I will be surprised if it is not an England, France, 1, 2, in that order. The battle for third will be very interesting. I think there will be some sort of bounce back from Wales, so it is very difficult to call any of the other matches, though I think Italy might struggle.
You mention 2015-I do think many overlook the fact england were missing lots of their best players who were playing sevens-which is why england had a significant blip in results as they did in 2013 too.always gets forgotten about. As for this year- given the irish form in the 2nd half of the season and the french form in WXV-ireland should be looking at home to win and beat france-and then at least second place is in sight. Ireland are very capable of beating france.
Despite France U18 and U20 hammering everybody since many years ,now, french A team is regressing every year. So it should be Ireland chance…