Until Monday, Republic of Ireland captain Katie McCabe and her team-mates had kept their lips zipped in the aftermath of Vera Pauw’s departure from her managerial position, but that silence was broken when the players gathered in Dublin ahead of Saturday’s meeting with Northern Ireland at the Aviva Stadium.
While McCabe was conciliatory enough in her remarks, while deeming the saga being painted as an exercise in player power as “unfair”, veteran defender Diane Caldwell was, writes Gavin Cummiskey, “calm and calculated” as she gave the Pauw regime both barrels.
“From my position as a pretty experienced player I don’t think it was up to the standard I expected at international level,” she said. “I think the results and performances that we got were in spite of Vera being our coach.”
It remains to be seen if Pauw will have anything to say in response to Caldwell’s criticism. This one could run and run.
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Things are considerably more serene in the Irish camp over in France as they prepare for that humongous tussle with South Africa on Saturday. Gerry Thornley heard from Paul O’Connell, James Ryan and Ronan Kelleher ahead of the game, O’Connell acknowledging that Ireland will be facing the best defensive lineout in the world.
With Scotland still to play, a win on Saturday wouldn’t, of course, guarantee Ireland top spot in the pool, but whoever captures that prize, writes Gerry, would avoid meeting France in the quarter-finals, as well as earning an extra day’s rest. A sizeable prize, then.
South Africa will have Eben Etzebeth back for the Irish game, Johnny Watterson on hand to hear Springbok director of rugby Rassie Erasmus reveal that the influential lock has recovered from the shoulder injury he sustained in their game against Scotland.
Owen Doyle, though, is struggling to recover from the impact the bunker system is having on the World Cup, its inconsistencies thus far “risking chaos”. The blame, he says, “lies firmly with World Rugby, which agreed to rush the deployment of the bunker in the first place. The World Cup is not the place to experiment … the result, so far, is indeed “la grande folie”.
Back home, the “seismic news” in Gaelic games is the appointment of Mickey Harte as Derry manager after he stepped down from the Louth job. Gordon Manning fills us in on how it all unfolded, the news “even more shocking than the dispatch three years earlier confirming his arrival in the Wee County”.
And in golf, Philip Reid looks ahead to a “two-week festival of golf in Europe”, starting with the Solheim Cup, which gets under way on Friday in Spain, and followed by next week’s Ryder Cup in Italy.
TV watch:: There’s a feast of televised Champions League football on today, starting with AC Milan v Newcastle at 5.45 (TNT Sports 1), before you’ll have to choose between Feyenoord v Celtic (RTE2), Barcelona v Royal Antwerp, PSG v Borussia Dortmund and Manchester City v RS Belgrade – all of them on TNT Sports and all with 8pm kick-offs.
