IT is now exactly nine weeks until the start of the Women’s Rugby World Cup and the Ireland Women’s squad (sponsored by Aon) continue to build towards their opening Pool C match against Japan on Sunday, August 24.
Head coach Scott Bemand has put a 37-strong group of players through their paces at the IRFU High Performance Centre in Blanchardstown over the last three weeks, for this initial phase of pre-season training.
Ahead of the World Cup in England, Ireland will play Summer Series games against Scotland at Virgin Media Park on Saturday, August 2, and Canada at Kingspan Stadium on Saturday, August 9.
Ticket details for the girls in green’s two warm-up fixtures will be available soon – to follow Ireland at the World Cup and buy your match tickets, click here.
Commenting on their World Cup preparations and how their training schedule has been mapped out, Ulster’s Brittany Hogan said: “We’re running in two blocks now before the warm-up games.
“We have this three-week block, and a deload week where we’ll remotely train at home. We’ll then have another three-week block where we’ll kind of put more rugby into it instead of running.
“Then we’ll have a fully-off week to reset the mind and start us fully into, ‘Right, okay, we’ve got warm-up matches this weekend and this is World Cup time now’.
“It’s run very well where we have those quite hard three weeks, one week off, hard three weeks, one week off, but we’re still getting all the work done, and we frontload our week.”
