Ireland and Harlequins flanker Anna Caplice is feeling excited about the upcoming Six Nations campaign, as well as the newly announced annual women’s international tournament.
Caplice was speaking at a media event for the charity ‘Tackle Your Feelings’. She – along with Ugo Monye – was launching the charity’s new campaign, encouraging people to #BeKind online during the final weekend of this year’s Guinness Six Nations.
"For the first time in rugby's history, a new, revolutionary women's 15s calendar"
This is WXV! 🏉 pic.twitter.com/vGGeZmX4s9— World Rugby (@WorldRugby) March 16, 2021
World Rugby recently announced a new annual tournament for the women’s game called WXV which will launch in 2023 and run in a similar format to the recent Autumn Nations Cup, with the teams of the Six Nations and the Southern Hemisphere sorted into three different tiers during the autumn international window each year.
Caplice said the news was a welcome surprise:
Very welcome, very exciting and promising – when we’ve had a bit of discussion around the Six Nations, obviously with COVID there’s been a bit of a pushing around, rejigging of the tournament and there’s been a lot of fear of us maybe keeping the Six Nations in that shorter format.
You almost get the sense of ‘is that going to happen’ or ‘are things going to reduce or get smaller or shorter’, so to get an announcement like this, especially when it’s been a spiral of really disappointing announcements one after another…it’s just really nice to hear that something is on the horizon that’s big.
One of the exciting opportunities the new tournament will present is a chance for Ireland to play against southern hemisphere teams more often.
Currently, chances to play the likes of New Zealand are rare outside of World Cup years, and Caplice is excited about the prospect of more games against them.
It’s definitely exciting because even in a World Cup you might not get a chance to play a team like New Zealand. We play them in an autumn international, but that’s not a yearly thing, you know.
Yeah, just to play different teams a bit more – we play the same Six Nations teams every year, sometimes without a summer tour, sometimes without autumn internationals.
You know, I’m really tired of playing Wales! We play them so often!”
The bad news for Caplice is that, even with a rejigged format and only three games for Ireland in this year’s Six Nations, their first game is against none other than Wales.
The flanker from Cork nonetheless said that the new format has not changed the way the team have been preparing.
It’s still a Six Nations for us. You know, we’ll take it – to have so much rugby taken away from us this year and…this year, a lot of people have lost things that are a lot more valuable than rugby to themselves.
We shouldn’t complain and we’re very lucky that we’ve been able to…you know, we’ve been supported by our union and World Rugby and the Six Nations to push for these tournaments to go ahead so we’ll take it in whatever format.
We just wanna play and prove that the work we’ve been putting in will be worthwhile.
Caplice was also in confident form, suggesting that the Ireland team have their sights set on taking a big scalp in this year’s tournament and that they will not be settling with tucking in behind England and France.
We would always be aiming for third and higher, anyway – anything less than that is a disappointing result for Ireland.
Sadly, the gap has widened there between England and France – you know, first and second, professional-professional – and everyone else, so when you’re aiming for third place or when you’d be happy with third place, that’s a bit disappointing.
I wish that wasn’t the case, I wish we were able to very realistically go for first place.
Caplice’s confident comments will be music to the ears of Irish fans, with the countdown well and truly on to Ireland’s opening game against Wales on the weekend of April 10th.
Pictured is Irish International & Harlequins Rugby Player, Anna Caplice who is encouraging people to #BeKind online during the final weekend of this year’s Guinness Six Nations, as part of the Tackle Your Feelings campaign, run by Rugby Players Ireland and funded by the Z Zurich Foundation. Tackle Your Feelings today released the final video in its reverse role-modelling series to highlight racist online abuse by using examples directed at rugby players.
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