Bemand Wants Emerging Players To ‘Really Start To Push Into The Group’

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It is the start of the next Rugby World Cup cycle, and with Eimear Corri Fallon and Nicole Fowley now retired from international rugby, and other established names unavailable for selection or sidelined through injury, a total of nine uncapped players have earned call-ups to Bemand’s Six Nations squad.

Ireland’s 36-player group includes sixteen players aged between 19 and 23, and is the youngest of the five announced Six Nations squads with an average age of 24.38 years. In addition, they have the Championship’s youngest captain in 22-year-old back rower Erin King.

Along with that youthful cohort, there is a bank of experience running through the selection which was lacking just three short years ago. With their World Cup exploits in England to build on, there are a dozen players in the current set-up with between 26 and 52 caps.

Speaking about the make-up of his selected squad, Bemand told Virgin Media Sport: “With a young group still, the blend of experience hasn’t got ‘old’ experience yet. We’ve got young experienced players now with our group.

“The nine we’ve brought in, three are brand new. Six have been on multiple competition phases with us. Caitríona Finn has travelled with us to WXV1. She’s been part of Celtic Challenge now for a couple of years.

“She’s been in camps regularly. She was in camp last year for the Six Nations. So, girls are coming through who actually aren’t brand new. They’ve been in and around our environment now for a while.

“I’m hoping some of those girls come through and really start to push into the group. Post World Cup, we’ve got four years to the next World Cup. We want to start getting competition into competition, and people starting to push through and break into the team.

“So, we think we’ve got some potential in the group. How quickly we can bring it through, the Six Nations gives us our first opportunity to do that.”

Attack-minded IQ Rugby full-back Niamh Gallagher comes in on the back of scoring three tries and 49 points for Trailfinders in the PWR across the water. The 20-year-old has been part of the national pathways since 2024, playing for the Ireland Under-20s in two Summer Series tournaments.

The other eight uncapped selections have used this season’s Celtic Challenge to impress, most notably Aoibheann McGrath, Alana McInerney, and Robyn O’Connor, who have scored 15 tries between them, and teenage back rower Jemima Adams Verling, who has racked up a team-high 834 match minutes for the Clovers.

20-year-old hooker Beth Buttimer is also closing in on her first cap after being part of the World Cup squad, while increasingly-influential out-half Dannah O’Brien only turned 22 last September but has already lined out 33 times at senior level for her country.

O’Brien has played a key role in the Wolfhounds reaching Saturday’s all-Irish Celtic Challenge final against the Clovers. She is the cross-border competition’s leading points scorer with 52 points, just ahead of Clovers starlet Finn, who was in fine form at out-half until her recent quad tear.

Bemand commented: “Some of the things that we’ve been working on, obviously it’s been a young group and some of that young group has done its growing up, its developing on the world stage. So we know we’ve got a stack of experiences now into the players.

“Someone like a Dannah O’Brien. She got (international) caps before she got interpro caps, so she’s done her growing up very much on the world stage. Probably in the World Cup we saw somebody start to really grow into a performance and own an 80 minutes.

“Now, we’re working towards an 80-minute performance, and I think it’s not just Dannah, a lot of the youngsters across the board, they’ve now got experiences that they can lean on which will serve them well in the future.”

Following this weekend’s Celtic Challenge decider in Edinburgh and the latest round of Premiership Women’s Rugby in England, the Ireland squad will come back into camp on Tuesday, honing in on that mouth-watering opening fixture away to the World champions.

Bemand has brought an Ireland team to Twickenham before, a lopsided scoreline of 88-10 two years ago not fully reflecting the game as a contest. They got much closer in Cork last April, taking the lead through Amee-Leigh Costigan and only trailing 7-5 at half-time before John Mitchell’s side surged clear to win 49-5.

For this fast-approaching rematch in London, the teams will be led by newly-appointed captains King and Megan Jones. Ireland are bidding to break into the top two of the Six Nations after back-to-back third place finishes, while England are chasing their eighth Championship title in a row.

The English team’s first outing since winning the World Cup on home soil is proving a huge draw, with over 70,000 tickets sold for the Allianz Stadium clash on April 11. Getting the best out of themselves at the venue for the 2025 World Cup final would be a marked step in the right direction for the girls in green.

“Being part of the women’s space, we want to play on the big stages, we want to play in front of big crowds. Like, you look at where this has come from and where it is going, not just in Ireland, but in rugby in general in the women’s space.

“The World Cup was phenomenal. It was a great show that was put on that really got the public, not just in England but around the world, buying into it. So I suspect it will be damn close to selling out by the time we get there in a couple of weeks’ time.

“The occasion last time (in 2024) was a factor in the result, with a really young group. A lot of our girls have been there now and done that, so we’re going to turn up, we’re going to be the best version of ourselves.

“We’re going to incrementally try and get performances that go deeper, offer more. If we keep doing that then at some point we believe we’re going to close the gap,” added Bemand.