Carla Ward believes Ireland can continue to inspire future generations as their World Cup fate leaps into the play-offs in October.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you said at the start we would have a chance here and run France close, I would have snapped your hand off,\u201d reflected Ward after accruing nine points from a possible 18 in the group.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur players deserve an awful lot of credit for what\u2019s been achieved but I\u2019ve told them that this is the start, not the end.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ireland struggled to cope with the fourth best team in Europe early on, but aided by a sending off with 20 minutes left, they ended the game ruing a litany of missed chances.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were hoping that France wouldn’t find rhythm but did prepare for the onslaught it was.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe managed that in the first 20 minutes; we really did, because we knew they would want to try and pull us out with all their rotations.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn’t allow them to and It’s taken a moment of magic, an overhead kick from a wonderful individual, a wonderful talent, to win them the game.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey haven’t cut open our back line too often.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope the young girls look up to these players because they have inspired a lot of people.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a long way away and we will find out who we get and prepare as quickly as possible.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe World Cup is the ambition, we have a different route but it tells some story that we are disappointed to lose.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe World Cup needs this group, they are a special group.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carla Ward believes Ireland can continue to inspire future generations as their World Cup fate leaps into the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":491558,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1113,61,60,2539,5782,43,5783],"class_list":["post-491557","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-fai","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-league-of-ireland","tag-local-soccer","tag-news","tag-premiership"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491557","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=491557"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/491557\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/491558"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=491557"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=491557"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=491557"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}