To continue their upward trajectory, Bemand, who has signed a new deal to stay with Ireland until the conclusion of the 2029 Women’s Rugby World Cup, has freshened up his squad and opted for a change of captain.<\/p>\n
There are nine uncapped players in the 36-strong panel while winger Amee-Leigh Costigan, who captained the side throughout last year’s championship, and former co-captain Edel McMahon, are out.<\/p>\n
The armband has been passed to returning back row Erin King, who Bemand believes is the ideal candidate to lead the green wave into a new cycle.<\/p>\n
He said: “Erin embodies the Ireland player of the future of how she attacks training and how she is – honest, driven and a resilient player.”<\/p>\n
The 22-year-old recently returned from the serious knee injury which forced her to miss last year’s World Cup and is relishing her new role.<\/p>\n
King believes Ireland must target being competitive in both games against the top two and it is not an unrealistic goal.<\/p>\n
They were well in the game at half-time in Cork last year when they trailed 7-5, only for England to blow them away in the second half to win 49-5.<\/p>\n
At the World Cup in the summer, Ireland led 13-0 at the break before France came back with 18 unanswered points to progress to the last four.<\/p>\n
“We know we are bridging the gap to the top two teams – France and England. They’ve been professional for a lot longer than us but the last few years of our professionalism is paying off now,” she said.<\/p>\n
“Last year we held it to England for a good while so it would be great if we could compete for the full 80 [minutes] against them and get to get one up on France, we can definitely compete with them. <\/p>\n
“With the squad we have, we can do things we’ve never done before. We just want to get going.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"To continue their upward trajectory, Bemand, who has signed a new deal to stay with Ireland until the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":385989,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-385988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=385988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/385988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/385989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=385988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=385988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=385988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}