The Front Row Union Sport - Women: Top Eight Finish for Ireland in RWC7’s

Women: Top Eight Finish for Ireland in RWC7’s

Jul 1, 2013

—

We are currently carrying out a necessary behind-the-scenes upgrade to how images are stored and delivered on The Front Row Union Sports. With over 770,000 images on the site, we are moving our entire image library to a dedicated cloud storage service. This means images will load faster for you, regardless of where you are in the world, and the site will be more reliable overall.

As we are working on three separate versions of images during the offload process, the site cache sometimes struggles to keep up with which version to display and occasionally post grid images or complete galleries may fail to appear. This is a temporary side effect of the migration process — the image exists and is safe, it is simply in the process of being moved to its new home and identified as being there. A refresh of the page will usually bring them back, however, if it does not please contact john@thefrontrowunion.com stating clearly the post address and we will restore it as soon as possible. We apologise for any inconvenience this causes and appreciate your patience.

We expect the bulk of the image migration to be completed by the end of June 2026, with a fully upgraded version of the site ready to launch in August 2026. Once that work is done, the site will be noticeably faster, images will load more reliably, and you will not see any further disruption of this kind. Thank you for your continued support of The Front Row Union Sports.

Ireland Women ended their Rugby World Cup 7’s campaign in Moscow yesterday afternoon, achieving their stated aim of a top eight finish and qualifying for next season’s Sevens World Series.

Unsurprisingly, after a long season of International and Sevens rugby, for most of the squad, it’s no surprise that the team ran out of puff on the final day of the tournament losing both their play off matches in the knock out stages of the competition.

First up was a heartbreaking 14 – 5 loss to the USA in the tournament quarter-finals. Amy Davis put Ireland 5 – 0 in front with a well worked try and the girls in green defended strongly to keep their advantage till the last two minutes. Unfortunately the US ran in two late converted tries to progress to the semi final with Ireland dropping to plate competition where they faced old rivals England.

A 22 – 0 loss to the old enemy took some gloss of Ireland’s tournament, with England’s Katy Mclean, Kat Merchant, Alice Richardson, Joanne Watmore all scoring in a convincing win. The Ireland ladies will be disappointed to have reversed the recent dominance they have had over their near neighbours but I’m sure they will store this result away to bring out next season!

With no play-off of 7th place the Irish girls had to content themselves with watching the rest of the tournament finals, enjoying a few hours down time at the end of a very busy season!

It has been a season of great success for Irish Women’s Rugby with their first ever Grand Slam and their strong performances in their sevens outings. However it has been disappointing that both camps have relied on a fairly small core of the same players with few rising stars coming through the sevens development pipeline.

Of course it’s early days and these things take time but next season is going to be very interesting to see how the relationship between the Sevens Squad and the National Squad develops. Ireland’s interests should switch to defending their Six Nations Crown in preparation for THE Women’s World Cup in France in 2014 where they have a genuine chance of reaching the semi-finals and the Sevens Squad should begin the long task of developing a separate squad of sevens specialists in preparation for the Olympics in 2016.

With limited playing numbers, of the required quality, there are going to be a few difficult decisions for the bulk of this seven’s squad as doubling up for inclusion in both disciplines will not be to the overall benefit of either the individual players or the long term good of Women’s Rugby in Ireland.

However the relative success of both codes does open a huge range of opportunities for women players over the next few seasons – lets hope that the pathways are there to give them the opportunity to get to the top.

Ireland Women’s Sevens Squad: Jenny Murphy, Claire Molloy, Sophie Spence, Jeanette Feighery, Larissa Muldoon, Lynne Cantwell, Alison Miller, Shannon Houston, Amy Davis, Ashleigh Baxter, Laura O’Mahony, Nikki Caughey.