Great afternoon of rugby today for the Irish team against Wales in the women’s 6 nations tournament, with a scoreline of  36 - nil.

Clare Molloy runs past Laura Prosser of Wales
Stand-out player for me was winger Alison Miller who scored one try, and was involved in setting up two more. The other five tries were scored by Joy Neville, Sophie Spence, Niamh Kavanagh, Gillian Bourke and Ashleigh Baxter. Neville’s try was one of my favourites  - a rolling maul right down the sidelines. The Irish scrum was excellent as well, and defense just didn’t leave any openings for the Welsh team at all.

It was great to be so close to the action in the club-size pitch at Ashbourne, with a close-up view of some crunching tackles. Welsh flanker Sioed Harries made a massive tackle on Ireland’s captain Fiona Coughlan - defintely wasn’t the only one wincing at that. 
And the win was even more impressive considering two of the Irish players were sin-binned - one in each half - leaving them a player down for a good section of the game. The second card was minutes from the end so the score was pretty set at that point but … 
So half-time was 17-0, and this lead just lengthened in spite of some good effort from the Welsh team leaving the Girls in Green comfortable winners. The Welsh came closest to scoring when Philippa Tuttiett ran in metres away from scoring but she was stopped by Niamh Kavanagh leaving them with nothing to show for the day out. 
This leaves Ireland third now in the table, behind England and France who have won all three of their games so far. The full table of results is here on the RBS 6 Nations website.

The interviews I did with the Irish manager and captain at the Ireland-Italy match are here.