THE EXPECTATIONS WERE low coming into Ireland’s second round of the Six Nations, and France obliterated all chances of a shock before half-time had even arrived.

Nine tries and a 50-point winning margin while playing most of the game with 14 players was the sum of France’s superiority over Greg McWilliams’ side. Dannah O’Brien — who clocked in a decent display for her first Six Nations start — registered Ireland’s only points of the game when she kicked a penalty in the first half.

For the rest of the game, Ireland were fighting for crumbs. There are some key figures which highlight the difference in stature between the two nations. Ranked third in the world, France are a fully professional outfit who were runners-up in last year’s Six Nations. They’re a fully professional outfit.

By contrast, Ireland have just begun dipping their toes into professional waters. There is such a system in place, although it only came into effect this year. And the contracts that have been offered range in value between €15,000 and €30,000 per season. 

There’s also the absence of a performance coach akin to the role that Gary Keegan executes for the men’s team. 

“Not at this time, no,” Ireland captain Nichola Fryday told the media when asked if such a resource exists in the women’s unit.

“We work on that as a group. That’s engrained in you as an athlete, that you have to go to those dark places and pull yourself out. For me, as captain, all I can ask is that we’re the group that never gives up.”

Last week’s tournament opening defeat to Wales was a difficult watch and France brought another bruising fight on the Ireland players. But there were certainly elements of their game that were encouraging to see, particularly a period in the first half when Ireland reduced the deficit to seven via that O’Brien penalty after France were hit with a red card.

“We improved a lot from last week,” McWilliams told the media after full-time.

“We’ll look back on the footage and be analytical and pinpoint what’s important to improve. Sometimes if you try to improve everything you improve nothing. If we look at three or four areas that we believe are important to get right we’ll put in a better performance and that’s what we want from this group, development.”

Fryday was in similarly emboldened form, praising her teammates for committing to the end in front of a home crowd in Musgrave Park.

“We put them under pressure at times and not executing those chances that we had is frustrating,” she said. “But we’ll go back and that will be an area that we need to focus on. But the other side is that we took away a lot of their threats. The girls really stuck into the battle for their mauls and I’m really proud of that.

“You do have frustrations but you do have to look at the bigger picture: we’re at the start of our journey and it’s going to take time. All we ask is that people stick with us and today, the crowd definitely did. Going down along the pitch to all those little girls – you have to remember that they look at you as their role model and regardless of the scoreline, they still love and adore you.”

Ireland will have a break now before travelling to Italy for their third-round outing. McWilliams accepts that the results so far don’t make for pleasant reading, but pointed out that this is not the first time that Ireland have suffered through a building period.

“I understand it’s not what the Irish public want, they want us to be winning games but I remember back in 2010, 2011, losing matches by bigger scorelines but it wasn’t shown on TV and we got a couple of column inches so we were able to go through that journey without the public and without being on TV and now the public are seeing this journey and we hope that they stay supportive of, most importantly, the players.”

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