Girls U18 League: Larne downed by Monaghan.

—

by

John McMurtry

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.

The U18 Girls match reports will have an obvious bias as I’m helping coach Larne Ladies. First season at it, still to do my Coaching cert’s but hey – I know everything there is to know about the Women’s game in Ireland (that was sarcasm just so we’re all clear  😆 ) so how hard could it be? Well, goodness me, it is hard – coaching being the smallest part of getting a team out on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon.

Regular readers will be aware of our leading coverage of Women’s Rugby in Ireland but, I must say that, covering the game from the other side of the lens has been much more challenging than I originally thought it would be. I certainly have a new found respect and admiration for those uncelebrated members of clubs throughout Ireland that keep the this great game of ours running on and off the pitch. Heros one and all.

So, we are two games into the season and we’ve yet to record a win. A narrow defeat, by one try in eleven, away to Armagh, was followed up this weekend with a thorough working over by Monaghan at home.

This new league has it’s challenges, with only four out of the six fixtures to date in the league fulfilled. Thankfully we’ve managed to field in both our U18 games so far but with the players moving up en-mass from our U15’s programme we are going to struggle there throughout the season so a major recruitment drive will be underway shortly.

As for the game? It was played as 11 aside and Monaghan got on the scoreboard first with a converted try. Larne hit back with tries from Rachael Livingstone and to take a 10 – 7 lead about 15 minutes in. Unfortunately, after that the experienced Monaghan side, featuring Ulster U18’s players ,  and , cut loose to rack up a further ten tries throughout the game.

A hard lesson, but we’ll start working on it tonight. Bring on next week’s game.

Big thanks to Ian Humes Photography for covering this one as I was otherwise engaged.

GALLERY BELOW

IF in Doubt, sit them out

Download the UK Concussion Guidelines for Grassroots Sport Here

Corrections

Drop us a note below if there are any corrections required in this article.

← Back

Thank you for your response. ✨

Rugby Latest