Ashbourne victory marks a watershed for the girls in green

After their win over England, Ireland now face Scotland for Triple Crown glory, writes MALACHY CLERKIN

When it came to out-and-out thrashings, England always took an egalitarian approach to the whole business. The last thing you would have accused them of was discrimination. You turned up with your palms facing the floor and you got the ruler across the knuckles. Nobody was picked on. Nobody wasn’t picked on.

The first time Lynne Cantwell played for Ireland, she stood on the wing for every minute of a 79-0 defeat in Worcester back in 2002. “Did I touch the ball?” she laughs. “No I didn’t. Are you mad?”

Fiona Coghlan wasn’t in that side, mostly because she’d only started playing rugby the previous year at college. She was in the one that lost 46-3 in Thomond Park the following year though. And the 51-0 at Twickenham in 2004. And the 32-0 at St Mary’s in 2005. And on and on and ever on.

You’d call them gluttons for punishment but then you’d have to reassess the term once you met Philip Doyle. Before last Saturday, Ireland had played England 17 times in international women’s rugby and had lost every last game. He can’t be 100 per cent certain but Doyle would be willing to bet a reasonable amount that he’d been to all 17, some as a supporter and the rest as the coach.

His first game in charge was that 51-0 in 2004. For years, their best day was a 29-10 defeat in 2006. “The girls were over the moon because we scored two tries. I was fuming but as far as they were concerned we might as well have won the World Cup.”

Getting Somewhere

Even in the past three years when he felt they were finally getting somewhere, they played England four times and lost 22-5, 27-0, 31-0 and 23-6.

So when the clock was ticking dead last Saturday in Ashbourne and they were 25-0 ahead, nobody would have passed the slightest remark had England snuck in for a late score. The final whistle would still have sounded to the same level of delirium, the Irish squad and their supporters would still have melted into the same puddle of hugs and tears. Even their coach would likely have only brought it up to tease them.

“But they didn’t do it,” says Doyle. “They defended for 29 phases in a game that was already won and they didn’t give up a try. Twenty-nine phases. They gave a way one penalty that the English girls tapped-and-went from but the girls kept them out. They didn’t give up the try.” Ireland had the ruler now. They weren’t of a mind to spare anyone’s knuckles.

Everybody calls him Goose. Philip Doyle cringes when you ask why, as well he might. “It’s, eh, it’s, well, it’s a Top Gun thing,” he says finally. Back in the mid-90s, Doyle was one of Ireland’s best Paintball players. If you didn’t know that there was an All-Ireland championship for that sort of thing, well the fact that the current coach of the Ireland women’s rugby team won five consecutive titles will be news to you too.

They used to play a Five Nations tournament against like-minded boy-children from across the water and when they suited up for Ireland, they gave themselves names to sew onto their uniforms. So he became Goose and it stuck. Maverick lives in Canada now.

Twenty years ago this week – on Valentine’s Day 1993, to be exact – he and his wife travelled to Edinburgh to watch Ireland’s first ever women’s rugby international. Since it was Scotland’s first as well, someone hit on the idea of staging it at Raeburn Place, site of the first ever men’s international against England away back in 1871.

Scotland won 10-0 and if anybody felt history’s hand on their shoulder they kept it to themselves.

“I remember that the girls had to buy their own kit,” says Doyle. “And what they got was men’s kit, obviously. There was no such thing as kit for women – it just didn’t exist. Last year, before one of our internationals, we had Joanne Moore in to present the jerseys the day before the game. Joanne was Ireland’s first ever outhalf and she’s tiny. She brought with her that day the jersey from that first international and it was this massive men’s jersey. I swear to God, Paul O’Connell would find it a bit on the baggy side. So not only had she to wear this huge, wide yoke playing for Ireland, she had to pay for the privilege as well.”

That’s just how it was back then and time didn’t change an awful lot. Doyle remembers being dragooned into coaching the Irish team three weeks before the 1998 World Cup. They paid their own way to Amsterdam and slept on floors when they got there. They lost to Australia, to The Netherlands and to Kazakhstan (twice) but dug out a win over Italy.

“It was a completely unknown world for everybody back then. Not just us, everybody involved in the whole tournament. It was very disorganised and that’s not me giving out – we were very disorganised ourselves. We didn’t know what we were doing. I have great memories of Amsterdam but we were right at the bottom of the food chain out there.

By accident

“In rugby terms, our biggest problem was the setpiece. Can we keep our own ball, can we get ball to the 10 off our own line-out? And can she kick it? That was all we were doing in training – scrums and lineouts, trying to get the ball to our backs to see if they could do something, anything.”

Cantwell arrived into this world more or less by accident a couple of years later. A sports science student in Limerick, she was essentially a bored sprinter most of the time. At UL, they threw her a ball and told her to run around people. Within 18 months, she was an Ireland international.

Coghlan didn’t have Cantwell’s speed but she was hardy and brave and bored as well. A PE teaching student, she signed up for a load of clubs and societies but it was rugby that hooked her. She was fascinated by the technical side of the sport, loved learning it as much as playing it. Two years after touching a rugby ball for the first time, she too was playing for Ireland. Between them, Cantwell and Coghlan have just passed 130 caps but the difference between what it is to play for Ireland now and what it was then is incalculable.

“We would have had weekend camps,” says Coghlan, “but we would have been responsible for our own accommodation. Basically girls were travelling from wherever to St Mary’s off their own bat. We would have been responsible for our own lunches in between sessions. Then you would have gone away afterwards and probably stayed in someone’s house. Girls would be sleeping on floors, the whole lot.

“Back then, we had to take flights at all hours of the day to get places. I remember we used to have to be up at three in the morning to fly to Belgium to get the train down to France for a Six Nations game. It was the best that was available.”

“It was a social thing,” says Cantwell, “from the point of view that you do it because you love it and you meet like-minded people along the way. Like, myself, Fi and Joy [Neville] will be the best friends we have until the day we die. But you do it as well because you’re intent on doing the very best you can with the resources that you have.

“Unfortunately, because of the lack of resources at that time and the lack of access to good enough coaches across the country, we could only get to a certain standard. At the same time, these other countries were developing at a quicker rate. We literally were doing the best we could.”

The problem was that outside of the players and coaches, nobody took women’s rugby seriously. At a time when there were rivers of money swilling around any and all sports, you could have hopped across the women’s rugby tributary without breaking stride. The womens game existed as a separate entity. They were their own union, with their own structures and their own people. So much so that you won’t find them mentioned in the accounts section of any IRFU annual report before 2007.

“With the IRFU, we had to make small steps,” says Doyle. “You know, women’s rugby – some people just didn’t like it. Now a lot of people do, thank God. I don’t want to sound patronising towards the IRFU but we had to show them results before they would support us.

Tiny baby steps

“It was a matter of tiny baby steps for years and years. For years I was screaming out for a conditioning coach and for a programme to be put in place but there was no budget within the IRFU for it so the girls had to do it all themselves, down to coming up with their own programmes.”

Indeed, Cantwell’s college degree made her the team’s de facto strength and conditioning coach. “I used to give the girls the programmes for years,” she says. “But while I was doing my best, I wasn’t a specialist in the area or anything. Nobody knew how to do proper lifts in the gym or anything like that. It’s crazy when you look back on it but there was no actual focus on it.”

The change came when the union brought them in under the IRFU umbrella in 2008-2009. They suddenly had access to specialist coaching and proper strength and conditioning programmes. Now, when they have a training weekend, it’s in Johnstown House in Enfield. Nobody is sleeping on a floor, nobody is sourcing their own lunch. Everybody’s travel expenses are covered. In 2011, the IRFU accounts showed that they spent €326,268 on the women’s game.

Bit by bit and brick by brick, the results followed. The occasional tonking from England aside, the days of scoring zero points in a game bled away. They beat France for the first time in 2009 and then the USA in the 2010 World Cup. Of the world’s top teams, only Australia remain for them to beat – albeit that they’ve never yet faced New Zealand.

Up until last Saturday, England loomed above them always and seemingly forever. There has been some equivocating during the week, pointing out that some of the best English players are concentrating on sevens rugby now ahead of the Rio Olympics. Doyle doesn’t buy it.

“You could say we came up against a weakened English side but the depth of their playing pool makes that claim laughable. They could have put out three teams last weekend against us. They had a series against New Zealand in November – three Tests in two weeks – and they put out two different teams and still won. So I don’t fall for that one.”

No night out

From the outside looking in, the strangest thing about last Saturday – stranger even than the result – was their reaction to it. These are amateurs, remember, and they didn’t have another game for a fortnight.

Yet there was no night out. No session to celebrate finally casting off the yoke of oppression. They had their post-match meal and after a short debrief they went their separate ways. Some had flights to catch back to England where they live, some hopped in the car and headed down the country.

“That was all them,” says Doyle. “I asked them what they wanted to do. They came back and said that what they’d just achieved wasn’t worth a damn unless they beat Scotland. So they split up and went their separate ways.”

If they beat Scotland next Saturday afternoon, not only will they win their first ever Triple Crown but, crucially, they’ll nail down qualification for next year’s World Cup in France. That was the bullseye they had circled from the start of the year and beating England won’t count for a lot if they miss out on it. “I suppose that was what was down on the schedule,” says Cantwell. “To be honest with you, I think everybody was dreaming.I still haven’t cried yet and I’m a complete blubber! ”

Beat Scotland and the dam will surely burst. They’ll be hard-earned tears, salted by a decade’s graft when nobody wanted to know. “I have always said to them that we have to make history before people start looking at us,” says Doyle. “A lot of women say, ‘Aw, they put in so much, they should get the recognition for it.’ But what have we done? A lot of people try hard at a lot of things that nobody cares about. It’s frustrating, yes. But you’ve got to earn the right to be talked about.

“We have to make history.”

Ireland squad v England

15 Niamh Briggs

Age: 28. Height: 5ft 6in. Club: Munster/UL Bohemian. Caps: 27. Occupation: Garda.

14 Ashleigh Baxter

Age: 21. Height: 5ft 5in. Club: Ulster/Belfast Harlequins. Caps: 6. Occupation: Student.

13 Lynne Cantwell

Age: 31. Height: 5ft 3in. Club: Exiles/Richmond. Caps: 73. Occupation: Physiotherapist.

12 Jenny Murphy

Age: 23. Height: 5ft 9in. Club: Leinster/Old Belvedere. Caps: 5. Occupation: PE teacher.

11 Alison Miller

Age: 28. Height: 5ft 5in. Club: Connacht/Portlaoise. Caps: 3. Occupation: PE student.

10 Nora Stapleton

Age: 29. Height: 5ft 9in. Club: Leinster/Old Belvedere. Caps: 14. Occupation: GAA Promotional Officer

9 Larissa Muldoon

Age: 21. Height: 5ft 4in. Club: Exiles/UWIC. Caps: 11. Occupation: Student, Cardiff Metropolitan University.

1 Fiona Coghlan

Age: 31. Height: 5ft 9in. Club: Leinster/UL Bohemian. Caps: 65. Occupation: PE and Maths Teacher.

2 Gillian Bourke

Age: 28. Height: 5ft 5in. Club: Munster/UL Bohemian. Caps: 32. Occupation: Video Analyst.

3 Ailis Egan

Age: 29. Height: 5ft 8in. Club: Leinster/Old Belvedere. Caps: 8. Occupation: Fundraising Administrator, MS Ireland.

4 Sophie Spence

Age: 25. Height: 5ft11in. Club: Exiles/Mowden Park. Caps: 6. Occupation: Teacher.

5 Marie-Louise Reilly

Age: 32. Height: 6ft 4In. Club: Leinster/Old Belvedere. Caps: 21. Occupation: Sports Development Officer, Dublin City Council.

6 Siobhan Fleming

Age: 31. Height: 5ft 10in. Club: Munster/Tralee. Caps: 6. Occupation: Special Needs Assistant.

7 Claire Molloy

Age: 24. Height: 5ft 5in. Club: Exiles/Bristol. Caps: 22. Occupation: Medical student, Cardiff University.

8 Joy Neville

Age: 29. Height: 5ft 9in. Club: Munster/UL Bohemian. Caps: 65. Occupation: Student Development Officer, LIT.

16 Stacey-Lee Kennedy

Age: 26. Height: 5ft 4in. Club: Ulster/City of Derry. Caps: 5. Occupation: Customer support agent, Sky Ireland.

17 Fiona Hayes

Age: 30. Height: 5ft 6in. Club: Munster/UL Bohemian. Caps: 1. Occupation: Youth worker.

18 Lauren Day

Age: 27. Height: 5ft 9in. Club: Exiles/Waterloo. Caps: 18. Occupation: Teacher.

19 Leigh Dargan

Age: 31. Height: 5ft 10in. Club: Exiles/Saracens. Caps: 31. Occupation: Regional Business Manager.

20 Laura Guest

Age: 27. Height: 5ft 8in. Club: Munster/Highfield. Caps: 27. Occupation: Secondary School Teacher.

21 Amy Davis

Age: 27. Height: 5ft 5in. Club: Ulster/Blackrock. Caps: 26. Occupation: Strength Conditioning Coach.

22 Grace Davitt

Age: 30. Height: 5ft 3in. Club: Ulster/Cooke. Caps: 43. Occupation: Maintenance Technician, Belfast Docks.

23 Niamh Kavanagh

Age: 25. Height: 5ft 10in. Club: Munster/UL Bohs. Caps: 11. Occupation: Student Union president, LIT.