Captain back in favour
EDEL MCMAHON was delighted to be appointed ‘co-captain’ when the Ireland Six Nations squad was finalised.
Even more delighted to find herself designated ‘captain’ for the opening game against France in Le Mans as the other player in the job-share, Sam Monaghan, was ruled out through injury.
Following which she was dropped from the entire match-day squad for the second game against Italy; McMahon hadn’t played particularly well against France and was subbed early but it seemed a little drastic.
This week, however, McMahon was front and centre with coach Scott Bemand ahead of Saturday’s game with Wales in Cork suggesting she is about to be restored to the matchday squad if not the team.
If there was a specific reason for the jettisoning it wasn’t mentioned but the back-row admitted: “Selection is what it is and we had our chat and I went away and went after training the last few times and tried to put my hand up for selection again.
Confident
“That’s the way it goes. We had a good conversation about the way it was and I was confident that the girls were going to do a good job for us.
“It’s just how you carry yourself because week in week out you have to compete and keep driving the standards.”
Bemand’s reasoning mentioned coaching ‘craft’ and ‘honesty’ but about himself in the first instance and the group in the second.
“Ah, it’s the real coaching craft of it. We’ve always said, we want to be a group that is honest. We looked pretty hard at it and we saw some areas of the game that we need to go after.
“We’ve done plenty of reflecting on it. We obviously had that fallow week, which lets us roll our sleeves up and put some stuff right. There’s quite a natural thing, where the girls want to be pretty hard on themselves.
”A credit, say, to Tricky [Edel McMahon] over the last two weeks’ training. She’s absolutely training the house down.”