Aoife Wafer: 'We can see the Irish public and media jumping on that Green Wave'
Ireland international Aoife Wafer has been unveiled as Energia’s newest brand ambassador, further enhancing their commitment to powering the future of Irish rugby. Pic: ©INPHO/Ben Brady
Tuesday will be Aoife Wafer’s third Women’s Six Nations birthday as an Ireland player and while she is looking forward to just a small piece of cake to mark her 22nd, the back-rower also expects a full-on day in the analysis room.
Ireland will return to camp at the IRFU High Performance Centre looking to unpick just how their opening-round match-up with France got away from them on Saturday in Belfast.
After seven years of mostly one-sided defeats to the French, a rejuvenated Irish side under Scott Bemand had a long-awaited first victory over their rivals since 2017 in their sights when Wafer scored her second try of the game on 66 minutes at Kingspan Stadium. That reduced France’s lead to 17-15 with the momentum behind the home side but Ireland somehow fell short in the dying minutes, a Morgane Bourgeois penalty on 71 minutes and conversion of Marine Menager’s try two minutes later undoing all the impressive work of the first three quarters and even taking away the losing bonus point from Wafer’s side.
What needs to be put right ahead of this Sunday’s round-two trip to meet Italy in Parma will come out in Tuesday’s review.
“As a group, we'll come together and we'll discuss that,” Wafer said on Monday, “but it's a game that we should've won and we could have won so we're quite disappointed and frustrated by the result. But look, we can take a lot of positive things from it as well, to be honest.”
The review will not prevent the marking of the No.8’s 23rd birthday although its passing only occurred to Wafer after the game on Saturday.
“I didn't even realise it was my birthday,” she said. “I was so focused on France I completely forgot.
“Hopefully the social committee will have a little bit of cake or something. I share my birthday with Tricky - Edel McMahon - so that's pretty special.
“My first time in camp was obviously just before my first cap (in 2022) and we were prepping for the Wales game which was a few weeks before Italy and Brian O'Driscoll had come in to present jerseys so we had an absolute selection of cakes and Tricky and I were celebrating away the night before the Wales game so it's pretty cool to have a birthday in the middle of a campaign.”
A rebound victory would represent an ideal present and Wafer has backed her squad-mates to correct the errors of last weekend.
“You can only learn from what went wrong and what kind of decisions you might do next time so I think we pride ourselves on learning fast so we've got to reflect and learn fast for Italy and try to right those wrongs.”
Wafer said she has noticed a change in reactions from outside the Ireland camp since the team’s recent revival.
“You can see on the TV footage that all of us were gutted. We were disappointed. It's funny because the group itself is quite disappointed. We wanted to beat France but outside noise is still relatively positive. It's something that the group probably hasn't had in a while in terms of you lose a game and in the past we'd probably get slated over something and it would be, 'they should have done this or they should have done that', whereas nowadays it's still positive. Everybody can see what we're trying to do and what we're trying to grow.
“We can see that the Irish public and the Irish media is jumping on that Green Wave. Even though we're disappointed, we still know that we have a job to do this week and we still have the rest of the tournament to fix it.”
