Ireland back row Aoife Wafer will make her first appearance of the Women’s Rugby World Cup in Sunday’s quarter-final against France in Exeter.<\/p>\n
Co-captain Edel McMahon, however, misses out through injury.<\/p>\n
Wafer, 22, who will join English side Harlequins after the tournament, missed the pool stages as she recovered from knee surgery in July.<\/p>\n
The 2025 Six Nations player of the tournament initially remained at home to continue her rehab when Ireland departed for England, joining up with the squad only after their opening win over Japan.<\/p>\n
Her return to the side is one of two changes to Scott Bemand’s starting XV for what is Ireland’s first World Cup quarter-final since 2014.<\/p>\n
She takes the place of McMahon, who plays her club rugby for Exeter, after the flanker left last week’s defeat by New Zealand early in the second half with a knee injury.<\/p>\n
In the other change from that loss, Fiona Tuite comes in for Grace Moore in the back row.<\/p>\n
Moore is named among the replacements, with Claire Boles not in the 23, and in a final change on the bench Enya Breen is named in place of Nancy McGillvray.<\/p>\n
Stacey Flood and Eve Higgins, who also departed the 40-0 reverse at the hands of the Black Ferns with knocks, are fit to start at full-back and inside centre respectively.<\/p>\n
Loose head prop Niamh O’Dowd retains her place in the starting side with Ellena Perry named on the bench after being ruled out on the morning of last week’s concluding pool fixture. <\/p>\n
Ireland qualified for the quarter-finals as runners-up in Pool C, while France topped Pool D thanks to wins over South Africa, Italy and Brazil. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland back row Aoife Wafer will make her first appearance of the Women’s Rugby World Cup in Sunday’s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":137484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-137483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/137484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}