Ireland have drawn holders New Zealand, Japan and Spain at the 2025 Rugby World Cup in England, reviving memories of their greatest moment in the tournament when they beat the Black Ferns 17-14 at Marcoussis in 2014.
Scott Bemand’s Irish side have just come off a superb WXV1 tournament in Canada where they beat New Zealand in their opening pool match and the USA in a third and final game. They lost to the world number two ranked Canada.
Ireland drew a series 1-1 on their first ever summer tour in August 2022 against hosts Japan, while Bemand’s side beat Spain 15-13 in Dubai last year to win the WXV3 title.
Ireland co-captain Sam Monaghan, who was present in the BBC studios for the draw, said: “It is really exciting. The group is quite familiar from the last couple of years.
“We went on tour to Japan and just played Spain in the WXV3 and New Zealand we have just beaten so we can take confidence from that. Japan have kicked on in the last couple of years. They are an exciting and clinical team to play.
“Spain, that was a hard win last year. They have some serious pace with some of their Sevens players coming back in. They are exciting and passionate. New Zealand, I am buzzing to play them. They will definitely be up for rematch.”
Currently rehabbing an ACL injury, Monaghan has an outside chance of playing at the tail end of the Six Nations Championship.
The World Cup will take place from August 22nd to September 27th next year across six weekends in eight locations across England. The opening game will be played at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light, with the final at Twickenham. The dates, times and venues of the fixtures will be released next Tuesday.
Brighton and Hove Albion Stadium, Sandy Park, Salford Community Stadium, Franklin’s Gardens and York Community Stadium are other venues. Sandy Park in Exeter and Ashton Gate Stadium will host the quarter finals on the weekend of September 13th, with the Bristol venue also hosting both semi-finals on the weekend of September 19th.
Ireland’s first match at a Rugby World Cup was in the 1994 – the first ever tournament took place three years earlier – an 18-5 victory over a Scotland Students team, the latter hastily assembled after Spain pulled out, one of five countries to do so. The first two World Cups weren’t sanctioned by the then governing body, the IRB, who threatened sanctions against the participants.
The 1994 tournament was due to take place in Amsterdam but was switched to Scotland at the last minute. Ireland lost to France in their other pool match, before being beaten 76-0 by the then reigning champions USA in the quarter-finals. They lost to Scotland in the Shield semi-final before beating Japan 11-3 in the third and fourth place playoff in the latter event.
Ireland finished 10th (1998), 14th (2002), eighth (2006) and seventh (2010) before they produced their best ever finish, fourth, at the tournament staged in Marcoussis, home of the national headquarters of French rugby in the southern suburbs of Paris.
They followed up a victory over the USA with a stunning upset of the defending champions New Zealand. Tries from Heather O’Brien and Ali Miller, along with two conversions and a penalty kicked by fullback Niamh Briggs, saw them triumph 17-14.
The win was the first by an Ireland national team over New Zealand in a rugby match. A third successive victory, over Kazakhstan, saw them qualify for the semi-finals as second seeds.
England beat them 40-7 at the penultimate stage with hosts France squeezing past Ireland 25-18 in the third and fourth place playoff. An eighth-place finish in 2017 when Ireland hosted the tournament was disappointing but less so than their failure to qualify for the 2021 tournament, which was eventually played in 2022 because of Covid.
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Englishman Bemand has overseen an upward trajectory in Irish fortunes since taking over officially on August 21st, 2023. They won the WXV3 tournament later that year and then secured a third-place finish in last season’s Six Nations that got them into the recent WXV1 event in Canada.
Speaking in Canada, Beman admitted: “We want to be in World Cups, we want to be competing against the best teams out there. “We leave here knowing that there’s games there that we can win, and we’re expected to win, and we don’t fear that.
“There’s games that might be against Tier 1 nations that now we don’t go into with fear, we’re going in to put a performance out there and if that’s a winning performance then great. So, we want to get to the knock-out stages, we want to put our best performance out there, and I think we’ve got a group now that believes they can.”
Rugby World Cup 2025 pools
Pool A: England, Australia, USA, Samoa
Pool B: Canada, Scotland, Wales, Fiji
Pool C: New Zealand, Ireland, Japan, Spain
Pool D: France, Italy, South Africa, Brazil
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