The Harlequins forward endured an injury-hit 2025, missing the start of the Rugby World Cup after knee surgery and then sustaining a broken collarbone and re-rupturing her MCL.<\/p>\n
Wafer also broke the knuckle in her right hand in the win over Scotland at the Aviva Stadium in May of this year.<\/p>\n
“I’ve been working in London and trying to get the body in a good space again. I’m feeling good and ready to get back into camp and into games,” said the 23-year-old.<\/p>\n
“WXV pits the top 10 all against each other so we are fortunate enough to play Japan, USA and South Africa.<\/p>\n
“It’s a really exciting fixture coming up against USA in Tallaght, somewhere we have never played before, and then Japan, and then head to South Africa for a little bit, which will be amazing.<\/p>\n
“We have never toured there so it’ll be pretty cool. The Tests that are coming up, each of them will pose a different challenge.<\/p>\n
“It’s great to be playing five Tests and each year we seem to be playing more games. Everyone’s desperate to put on an Ireland jersey, so when you can do it an extra few times a year it’s even better.”<\/p>\n
Wafer highlighted some of the specific strengths of the three teams Ireland will face over the coming months.<\/p>\n
“The USA have a bit of everything in terms of physicality, breakdown pressure, decent in the lineout, as well as some really good scrummagers, so it will be a lot for us to tackle but a really exciting opportunity too.<\/p>\n
“The Japanese are incredible around the breakdown too, really hard to move and really rapid in the backs too.<\/p>\n
“The South Africans are renowned for their physicality. They have a pack that will happily beat you up and backs that can also beat you up.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Harlequins forward endured an injury-hit 2025, missing the start of the Rugby World Cup after knee surgery…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":620730,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,43],"class_list":["post-620729","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\/620729","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=620729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/620729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/620730"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=620729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=620729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=620729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}