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Scott Bemand endorses WXV as Ireland continue to grow
Following Ireland’s second-round loss to Canada in WXV 1, head coach Scott Bemand spoke of the importance of the competition in facilitating the side’s development.
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“WXV, the concept of being able to play a cross-format competition I think is outstanding,” the former England coach said.
“We play the Six Nations yearly, we know what it’s like to play the Six Nations teams. It’s great to have an opportunity to go and play others. The key thing for me is it’s competitive. People might have raised an eyebrow, Ireland a year ago where we were in the world rankings and what have you, us coming up here.
“We’re good value for being here, we’re making it hard for teams. We want to get a product out there that people in Ireland can really get behind. There’s obviously growing the entire women’s game in the world but we’ve got loads of young girls that are starting to play, maybe starting to play other sports but now people are asking to go to rugby clubs.
“We talk about some of our staff members and some of our players have kids, and their kids, their daughters are waking up last Sunday morning after we beat New Zealand and they want to go down to the rugby club.
“We’re trying to grow the game, we’re trying to take people along with us. Giving ourselves an opportunity to come to WXV 1 and play against tier one competition, I think we’re making a good fist of it. We’re putting a foot forward, we’re making teams sit up and see what’s going on in Ireland which is great. We’re not necessarily disrupters but we want to get into that World Cup contending group.
“We need these competitions to be able to do that. I endorse it, it serves as a great learning opportunity to play in something that will put us in good stead to go into the World Cup. We’ll have a tier-one nation in our group, we’ll be expecting our own standards to perform against those teams.
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“Hopefully, we’ll get to a quarter-final, and we’ll play potentially another tier-one nation. We need to learn how to play these games, we need to learn to perform in the big dances and this is a big, big part of that.”
Ireland pulled off an impressive victory over World Champions New Zealand in the first round of WXV, but suffered a 21-8 loss to hosts Canada this weekend, marred by two yellow cards in the first half.
The Irish side showed resolve in the second half to deny world number two side Canada any further points to turn the score from 21-3 at half-time to 21-8 at the final whistle.
Bemand added: “It shows where we are and where we’ve got to that we’re disappointed with the result. The result hasn’t gone our way, but there is a bunch of stuff that’s gone on in that game that could have rocked any team. To be right in the game deep into the first half, there was a bit of naivety I think where copped two seven-pointers late in that first half but then we go and regroup at half-time and come out and win the second half 5-0.
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“We’re actually sitting here disappointed that we didn’t execute against more chances, that we didn’t execute when we got into their 22 and gave ourselves opportunities in and around their 22. We think we’ve left some points out there. I’m immensely proud of the girls, we came here and we said we wanted to leave respected. We’ve gone some way to earn a bit more of that respect again today, but we’re quite quickly getting through the gears and wanting to be right in those games right until the death.”
“I think we’re in it, and the game was sort of working its way through. We were working hard to understand what the referee was asking of us from the set piece perspective. I felt we showed some great character in not getting too rattled by that. We managed to sort of get back to an even keel and then we’re getting our A game starting to go.
“We knew we’d have to withstand Canada’s pressure, we spoke all week about not letting them in and they got their points from entries that we feel were relatively soft on our behalf. We’ve got a bit to work on, a little bit of game smarts in that sense that we don’t want to be giving away cheap penalties and costing us yellow cards, and it does put us under pressure. We actually defended really well with 13, incredibly well, but that pressure takes its toll.
“As we started to get the girls back on there’s maybe a little bit of a mental off-switch because we think we’ve survived the ten-minute period. We’re continually adding layers to these players. It’s an unbelievable opportunity, Canada are second in the world at the moment. We’ve conceded three tries and we’re being really hard on ourselves.
“I’m so proud of the girls. It’s not proud as in good effort, it’s proud as in, we’re showing that we can fire shots. There will be more to come from this group as we learn, and we’ll learn quickly. We’ve got a tight turnaround for next week so we’ll recover hard, as ever, and we’ll try and keep this momentum going for the final game.”
Enya Breen captained Ireland for the first time in the match at Langley Events Centre, and echoed Bemand’s thoughts when she spoke of the benefit of the tournament.
“It’s great. In my past experience in the game we didn’t have many November internationals so to have a second competition in the year, a second chance where you can play against some of the best teams in the world, it’s going to be massive for our development.
“It’s great for us to learn from teams that are probably expected to be better than us and like we said already, we keep adding layers and we keep learning. It’s in games that you get those opportunities to learn and it’s in games that everyone gets to improve and I suppose hit the levels that we expect of ourselves.”
