It was a disappointing weekend for the Girls in Green as they set sail for London to take on the giants that are the Red Roses.
With positive performances against France and Italy and a win against Wales under their belt there was hope that they would do better than the 48-0 loss they suffered in Cork a year previous.
But alas the English girls once again proved too strong as they ran out as winners with a scoreline of 88-10. It was the highest scoreline put up against Ireland in 22 years.
Speaking to the media after the game Irish head coach Scott Bemand said:
We'll take our learnings. We said at the beginning we're either winning or learning and we genuinely mean that. They are a nice group, really honest, so we will work hard and we've got a really big game to be excited about next week. So we will dust ourselves down and we'll come back better from it.
The game got away from Ireland early on with the Roses cranking out 4 tries in the first 20 minutes. Defensively they were poor, something which they had been strong at throughout the competition, racking up 63 missed tackles over the course of the game. But Bemand remains ever positive that this will remain a learning curve for the girls and that they will build on their mistakes and come back stronger when they take on Scotland this weekend.
If there's tackles there to be made you got to make them, you have to work hard, fast and early to be a good position to make those tackles. Look I think the occasion just got away from us a little bit. But with a young group, now that they've experienced it, it's another notch isn't it, it's another step. I have every confidence in our ability to win from here and the momentum that we gained over a month in camp and games previous to this doesn't dissipate in one performance. We've got a great opportunity next week so we will work towards that.
Co-captain Edel McMahon was flying solo for the game as fellow captain Sam Monaghan was omitted from the squad for the clash. Speaking about how the players will recover from this thrashing she said:
We came into this game quite ambitious and I think, like Scott said, those momentum swings just caught us off guard a little bit. But look we finished the game out right to the end. Heads didn't go down. We were trying to problem solve on the go which to me is very encouraging to see, we were trying to question what do we do next and how do we change that momentum, which is something that we can bring into Scotland. We'll take that we put 10 points on England as we'll and we'll work hard and be very honest in our reviews on how we can fix things as we work towards Scotland
With Scotland on the horizon and another opportunity to claw their way back up the table Bemand noted how the team won't dwell on the result and will look to move and finish the competition on a strong note.
We won't dwell on it long. I think we've had 3 weeks of positive momentum then you have a blip, it depends how you approach it. I'm pretty confident that we can put this to bed quite quickly and retain momentum going into the Scotland game.
All eyes turn to the Kingspan this weekend as Scotland with an automatic qualifying place in the World Cup up for grabs.
It is teeing up to being a cracker of a game so get yourself down this Saturday. Kick off is 2:30pm and tickets can be found here.
