There’s always a lag effect in women’s sport. The wider sporting public tends to take a while to cotton on to progress and very often, the bandwagon is gathering speed before most people jump on. Ditto – and in plenty of cases even more so – the sporting press.
When the Ireland women’s rugby team won the Grand Slam in 2013, not a single player from that squad made the shortlist for the RTÉ Sports Person of the Year Award. Niamh Briggs was the leading scorer in the whole tournament, scuttling over for three tries on top of her kicking excellence and yet she didn’t make the list of 10 men and one woman (Annalise Murphy). It goes without saying that no Grand Slam-winning men’s team has ever been unrepresented on such a list.
Briggs was nominated the following year alright but even that felt like a token gesture, one that was actually at odds with what she’d achieved in 2014. Ireland dropped to third in their defence of the Six Nations and though they did manage a historic win over New Zealand in the World Cup, they ultimately came home from that tournament angry with themselves at not having backed it up.
They got smashed by England in the semi-final and didn’t land a blow in the third-placed play-off. But the win over New Zealand was a bright and shiny thing and by now, the women’s rugby team was becoming public property. We had caught up, however latterly. It meant that even though the success of the year was in no way comparable to 2013, Briggs went on the list.
As an example of the slow learning that gets applied to women’s sport, it takes some beating.
Those rollicking few years for the Irish women’s rugby team were supposed to be the start of something. Two Six Nations in three seasons, fourth in the World Cup, a slew of recognisable, bankable stars. For the first time ever, the floating Irish sports voter wouldn’t automatically breeze past them if they were on TV. The fact that they were on TV at all was novel in and of itself.
But then it all just disappeared. All the goodwill, all the big talk for the future, it all just scattered on the wind. Union neglect, shoddy foundations, a lack of resources – you can choose your own poison when it comes to the reasons behind the drop off. But what isn’t up for debate is that the broad sweep of public interest went elsewhere and hasn’t yet come back.
All of which provides a warning from very recent history for their soccer counterparts as Eileen Gleeson’s side prepare for next week’s Euro 2025 play-off against Wales. After a couple of campaigns of extremes – a Nations League one in which they were far too good for their opposition, followed by a Euro qualifying one in which they were handed some pretty chastening lessons – Ireland have a two-legged play-off against a country that is more or less our mirror image.
These are without question the two most important matches since the World Cup. And in their own way, they’re arguably even more crucial than those games in Australia in the summer of 2023. If that World Cup lit the fire for women’s soccer in Ireland, these games are vital to stop the embers dying out.
Big tournaments are everything. This is true of all sports but especially ones that are scrabbling for a foothold with the public. Your average sports fan isn’t all that interested in the fact that Courtney Brosnan is Everton’s reigning player of the year. Or that only three players in the WSL have more assists this season than Katie McCabe. Or that Amber Barret has scored four goals in her last six games for Standard Liege. This is niche nerdery, confined to the sickos among us. Dark web stuff.
But the World Cup grabbed the nation. Even though the games were on at a tricky time of day, even though Ireland only scored a single goal and earned a single point. It was an undeniable thing, a solid structure on the sporting landscape that summer, both in the run-up to the tournament and afterwards.
The messy end of Vera Pauw’s reign was a part of that, for sure. But even that was a notable development. In no other era of Irish soccer has anybody outside a tiny slice of the population given a solitary rooty-toot who was managing the Ireland women’s team. Still fewer had any interest in the rights and wrongs of any squabbles that might be going on within. It was the big tournament that made it all matter.
[ FAI made the right decision on Vera Pauw but they have to come out and own it nowOpens in new window ]
The Euros will do that again. Next July has a Lions tour and the All-Ireland finals but they’re towards the back end of the month. An Ireland team playing in the European Championships would have the whole run of the place to themselves for the first fortnight. People will watch it, people will go to it. You can book a July flight to Zurich right now for €150 return. Plenty will make a holiday out of it.
But Gleeson’s team have to get there first. It is entirely doable – Ireland are ranked 24th in the world, Wales are 29th and neither country has ever qualified for the Euros. This will be no giant-killing act, whoever comes out on top. It’s pretty much a coin toss, one that Ireland desperately need to fall in their favour.
Because we know what will happen if it doesn’t. The sporting circus will move on and everyone will decide to care about something else. The generation that built this team will begin to ebb. Denise O’Sullivan and Katie McCabe will be 33 and 31 by the time the next World Cup comes around, Louise Quinn will be 37. The world will keep turning and the moment will be lost.
And as the women’s rugby team of a decade ago will attest, once it goes, it’s very hard to get back.
