Meet the Irish women fighting for rights – and chance to beat England
⮞anna Caplice and team-mate Ciara Griffin will turn out for the Barbarians today but back home the game is in turmoil
Anna Caplice was sitting in the Barbarians team room, surrounded by luminaries such as World Cup-winning former England captain Katy Daleymclean, France’s Lenaig Corson and America international Hope Rogers, when a thought struck her.
“I just thought, we should all be on coaching courses because of the amount of rugby knowledge in this room,” said Caplice, the Ireland back row. “I hope when these players retire we are not burning that encyclopaedia of knowledge. Each of us should have the opportunity to coach. It shouldn’t be such a struggle.”
For all the excitement around lining up alongside such a starry cast for today’s Twickenham Test against South Africa, it is this struggle that is preoccupying Caplice and her long-time friend and former Munster team-mate Ciara Griffin, the Ireland captain who announced her retirement from international rugby at the age of just 27 last week.
The battle is particularly onerous in Ireland. The women’s game may have had a golden age in the mid2010s, when Ireland won the women’s Six Nations twice, including the 2013 Grand Slam, and reached the semi-finals of the 2014 World Cup, but it has been a struggle since. Despite hosting the 2017 World Cup, standards have slipped so far that they failed to qualify for next year’s rescheduled World Cup in New Zealand.
The remarks of performance director Anthony Eddy two weeks ago, when he effectively blamed the players for failing to qualify for the World Cup, rather than the organisational deficiencies, prompted widespread outrage in Ireland. The players cannot share the whole story, because of an ongoing review, but their words are telling.
“As a player group we are very upset and disappointed with not achieving a long-term goal,” Griffin said. “We are trying very hard to make sure that there are structures and resources put in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again and Ireland can be at all future World Cups.”
Caplice, who plans to continue with her international career, added:
“It is devastating when we put in two very good performances against teams who are going to that World Cup [United States and Japan]. I think we feel like we could have been there. We want to make sure we do and say the right things to make sure if we can’t leave the jersey in a better place through our performances, we will through our actions. We want to make sure that girls in the future are supported.”
What is not in dispute, however, is the need for the women’s game to receive more support – especially around the issuing of full-time contracts.
“I would like to see more nations support their athletes fully, or at least part time,” Caplice said. “No one is going to get it right first off. England didn’t get it right first time – there was trial and error. But things seem to be working really well for them now and we want to see that happening in the rest of the nations, so we can all finally beat the English.”
Caplice believes she and her colleagues train and play as professionals, even though their day jobs are not always recognised. Both she and Griffin are qualified teachers, with Caplice also working as a coach.
“A lot of the time it feels professional but the bank accounts don’t reflect that,” she said. “A lot of the language in the past few years got to me because people would use ‘a player has signed’, which implies a contract and money. People were congratulating me on ‘signing’ for a club but I was like, ‘There is no signing because there is no real money’.
“There is only a small financial reward in the past year or two that is starting to professionalise it, but there has always been a full-time training programme that every player is massively committed to.
“I think it is important to realise there are so many players that are not getting paid in the Premier 15s. We’re not looking for excuses, but I want people to realise that I have a job and that rugby isn’t my full-time job.
“You have a full-time job so you are earning money and then being asked to perform alongside players who are fully professional. Our own professional lives have to be respected as well.”
Griffin agrees. “You literally put your life on hold so you can play, because it means that much to you,” she said. “You have a full-time job but you still train like you are full time – it is a balancing act for people for the
moment.”