BY RICHARD BULLICK
WATCHING the latest world-class performance from Aoife Wafer last Saturday against France, it would have been easy to forget that the young Wexford woman was still just 21 and only made her first start for Ireland in the corresponding game 12 months ago.
Ireland lost their Guinness Six Nations opener 27-15 at Ravenhill but Wafer was a credible Player of the Match contender with her two tries, 17 carries for 86 metres – the best on either side – three turnovers and a dozen tackles.
However, while typically impressive, those statistics don’t do full justice to Wafer’s talismanic impact in the green jersey, and the way she came smashing round a lineout for Ireland’s first try evoked memories for some of Keith Wood’s score against England in 2001.
She was shortlisted for Player of the Round and, perhaps surprisingly, the only Irishwoman to make the first official Team of the Week for this Six Nations along with five English representatives and three apiece from France, Scotland and Wales.
Of course, Wafer wasn’t even born when Wood was pooping England’s Grand Slam partly early this century, though she has eventually reached the grand age of 22 having celebrated her birthday on the Tuesday after facing France.
The previous day, Wafer was being unveiled as a new brand ambassador for Energia, who have unsurprisingly joined two other Irish rugby partners, Opel and Aer Lingus, in adding her to their ticket in recent times.
Aoife Wafer put her photography skills to good use while out injured during this season’s interpros
Opel had already Linda Djougang and Aoife Dalton as brand ambassadors along with the sevens trio of Amee-Leigh Murphy-Crowe, Beibhinn Parsons and Stacey Flood while Djougang, Dorothy Wall and Neve Jones were the existing faces of the Aer Lingus link.
However, Wafer is inevitably in big demand now after an absolutely outstanding year which has seen her claim a hat-trick of Player of the Match awards for fantastic contributions to Ireland victories over Wales, Australia and New Zealand.
She followed up her first international try against France in Le Mans last March with that rousing score which sparked the hugely impressive 36-5 triumph against the Welsh in Cork and has bagged a brace on three occasions since.
The dynamic loose forward crossed the line twice as Ireland hammered Australia 36-10 in Belfast last September, repeated the feat a fortnight later in the famous upset of world champions New Zealand and did the same against France last weekend.
Wafer was shortlisted for Player of the Six Nations last season and made the Team of the Championship before picking up both Ireland Player of the Year awards, from Rugby Players Ireland and the Rugby Writers of Ireland.
The BBC selected Wafer in their Team of WXV in the autumn and she subsequently made the official World XV for 2024 when that ceremonial line-up was unveiled at the World Rugby Awards in Monaco at the end of November.
She has made a number of media appearances since, including doing RTE’s Late Late Show with Rory Best and alongside Brian O’Driscoll at an event attended by an audience the opening weekend of the men’s Six Nations earlier this year.
Wafer is someone who knows her own mind and is comfortable sharing a range of thoughtful, forthright opinions. Nor does she shy away from declaring an ambition to become the best women’s rugby player in the world.
So there was strong media interest in Monday’s audience with Wafer arranged to promote Energia and, as always, she was good value in reflecting on the game just gone, where improving Ireland are at and a range of other subjects.
“France is a game we could have won, and we should have won, so we’re quite disappointed and frustrated by the result. But what can you do, it’s gone now and in the past, though we can take a lot of positive things from it as well to be honest,” said Aoife.
“You can only learn from what went wrong and what kind of decisions you might make next time. We pride ourselves on learning fast so we’ve got to reflect and learn fast for Italy and try to right those wrongs.
“We had a big run-in to this campaign but we knew if we played our best we’d beat France. Some people might have called that optimistic and said we’re reaching a bit far, but we are an optimistic group and we want to be the best. We want to bring success back to Ireland.”
That ambition of a still largely young, very hungry group of players is being facilitated by a quality coaching ticket assembled by Scott Bemand, including the highly-rated forwards coach Alex Codling who has also been working some with the Munster men recently.
Among Codling’s areas of responsibility is the lineout and Ireland’s impressive 95 percent return against France, securing all but one of their 19 throws, is a vast improvement from last season’s statistic.
“He came into our group and the lineout wasn’t very reliable, it was quite dodgy in fact. We could do stuff with it but it’s probably something that could have potentially influenced decision-making on the pitch as well because, if you don’t have a functional set-piece then it will influence that factor too.
“But Codders came in and he obviously was quite technical in his stuff, whether that be how you lift someone or how you land as a jumper or how you create a maul – even stuff from foot patterning to foot positioning and where you put your hands.
“It’s something the group didn’t necessarily have in the past, and I don’t think I can speak highly enough of him. We’ve worked very hard on that with his guidance, and he installed that belief in us and he backed us in anything we did.
“We speak about it all the time with our set-piece in terms of what we want to achieve with it. We want to have a world-class set-piece, we want to be clinical, we want to be revolutionary and I think we saw that at the weekend with Codders’ guidance.
“All three tries came from lineouts. The first one was obviously a move that we had planned, we’d practiced it and it was quite technical and he guided us through it. I think that belief and confidence he instils within us with that piece is unmatched.”
A well-worked routine it undoubtedly was but the second element was Wafer’s ferocious physicality as the unstoppable ball-carrier, barging her way through several French defenders in getting over for the try.
Wafer is no longer under the radar now but, knowing the threat she poses and containing it are two different things. She’s a marked woman at this stage and the French were loudly warning each other about her on the pitch but none of it seems to ruffle Aoife’s feathers.
“If they want to put extra players on me to try tackle me, I’ve no problem putting a team-mate through a hole and letting them go over because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter who scores or makes the metres as long as it’s a good thing for the team.
“If the girls want me to run into three Frenchies, I don’t mind putting my head down and trying to burst through a wall. I couldn’t hear the French players but I think you’re so focused in a game you can somehow only hear what your team-mates are saying.
“It’s nearly like you’re just programmed to listen to whatever the girls say. Those other voices didn’t enter my head. To be honest I can’t even hear my mother when I’m playing a club game so I’d be doing well to hear unfamiliar voices calling out my name.”
As well as crediting the technically excellent Codling with honing Ireland’s set-piece proficiency and all-round forward play, Wafer also appreciates the honesty with which he goes about his work with no allowances wanted or made for it being a women’s team.
“It’s probably something he’s brought across from the men’s game that not all male coaches do. Sometimes a male coach will come into a women’s environment and they won’t necessarily be completely honest.
“They’re afraid a player might be upset with what they say or that they may not like it, that kind of thing. But Codders has come in and he’s just been like, ‘this is what we’re doing, this is why we’re doing it’, and we’re like ‘ok, let’s try it’.
“He’s not afraid to say ‘Ok Aoife, your strength is X, you’re not as good as somebody else at Y, so this is what we’re going to do. And I’m like ‘yeah, ok, it’s best for the team, let’s do it. It’s that mindset that, whatever we do, if it’s best for the team then that’s all that matters.
“He’s very honest in those conversations and he has no problem with saying to somebody ‘you’re better at this, so let that person do that job’. That’s probably what I’ve taken from him,” she reflected.
Turning attention to this Sunday’s match against Italy in Parma, Wafer also sings the praises of another of Bemand’s backroom team, performance analyst Cian O’Brien, who she describes as ‘probably one of the best in the world at his job’.
“There’ll be packages with Italian lineouts, scrums, kicks, player packages where there are certain people that we can go after,” explained Wafer, who won her first cap coming off the bench against Italy as a teenager in the 2022 Six Nations.
“He’ll have everything set up for the whole group, or for a strategy group that consists of certain players in the squad, and then they feed into the coaches too, to make a plan of how we’re going to target the Italians.
“We know the Italians have quite a big kick variety and that’s something that we’ll have to look at, and they can be quite physical as well,” said Wafer, of a team only beaten 38-5 away by an admittedly understrength England in the opening round of fixtures.
“They’ve got a pack that can have a good set-piece, like we saw last year – they mauled us over for a try that proved to be quite crucial in that game. So, yeah, it’s something that we’ll definitely kind of target.
“Italy have some players who are absolutely outstanding. You look at (80-cap centre Beatrice) Rigoni, she’s a phenomenal rugby player, but they are beatable, and last year that was a game that got away from us in the RDS (losing 27-21).
“We had a lot of chances to put them away. We had most of the possession and most of the territory, but it was our own mistakes that let Italy into the game, like giving away a penalty, allowing them to kick for the corner and maul us over. That kind of thing.
“But then you also look at the next result that we had after Italy, which was Wales, and we went out and pummelled Wales because we’re a group that learns fast and that is reflected in our honesty with each other.
“I have played Italy twice and we obviously lost in the RDS last year, though in my first cap we won at a time which probably wasn’t the best for Irish women’s rugby but we got our result,” recalled Wafer, who has special memories from that 2022 Six Nations.
As someone who had really admired Edel McMahon, nine years her senior, while coming through the ranks, Wafer was thrilled to share a birthday with her fellow flanker and the iconic O’Driscoll also paid a visit to the camp that Six Nations.
“It’s pretty cool to have a birthday during the Six Nations. That first year we were in camp, prepping for the Welsh game, which came before my debut against Italy. Brian O’Driscoll came in to present the jerseys and we had a selection of cakes!
“It’s special sharing my birthday with our captain Tricky (Edel McMahon) and hopefully the social committee will have a little bit of cake or something,” said Wafer, who has still the utmost respect for her fellow birthday girl despite her own world-class status these days.
The pair both missed Ireland’s defeat in Parma two years ago through injury, Wafer having torn her hamstring off the bone in sevens training shortly after winning her first cap in that victory over Italy in Cork.
It was very tough to take for a promising player who had just started an exciting career chapter, particularly one who had dreamed of pulling on the green jersey from when she was a very young girl.
Unlike most Ireland women’s rugby players, who took up the sport a lot later, Wafer began at Gorey RFC aged just six, grew up in a rugby-mad family and was an unashamed super-fan of that team in green who had such success in the early-middle part of last decade.
She has been labelled a ‘first generation rugby native’ in terms of the women’s game in this country and there is no doubt being steeped in the sport for so many years has been beneficial for Wafer.
After that long lay-off, Aoife didn’t pull on the green jersey again until the autumn of 2023 in Dubai, coming off the bench in the second half as Ireland fought back from 10 points down against Spain to claim the WXV3 title.
On the first Saturday of the following January, Ireland boss Bemand told this writer that Wafer would be ‘World XV material within a year’, which felt like an incredibly bold claim at the time but she has more than justified his statement of faith.
There have been poignant times too, with one beloved granny passing away a few days before that Spain game in Dubai and the other during last spring’s Six Nations but, with a wonderful family behind her, Wafer is doing them both proud in that red scrumcap.
It’s already recognisable throughout the women’s rugby world and, increasingly, within Irish sport, while Wafer’s ability to connect with audiences allied to her gladiatorial displays on the field is a compelling combination.
She really resonated with the Cork crowd when addressing them over the tannoy after last April’s win over Wales and likewise we warmed to how attentively she dealt with the little girl presenting her Player of the Match award after that famous scalping of New Zealand.
In this World Cup year, there’s a lot on the shoulders of one still very young woman as the Ireland team’s taliswoman and the sport’s poster girl in this country, but that won’t unduly worry Wafer who happily takes it all in her stride.
Various niggles mean that she has actually played very little rugby since the end of the WXV1 tournament in Vancouver in mid-October – just three Celtic Challenge outings for Wolfhounds and none of them for more than 40 minutes.
Yet Wafer, who like her dad Aidan is a dab hand at sports photography when not playing, has been able to hit the ground running in the Six Nations, just like she did against Australia last summer having barely featured in the interpros while still recovering from a foot problem.
She still spends any enforced down-time actively contemplating how she can become better as a player and Aoife feels that a previously disinterested or even critical Irish public is increasingly coming behind this highly-dedicated Irish squad as they try to keep building.
“The group itself is quite disappointed about last Saturday. We wanted to beat France but the outside noise is still relatively positive, with more constructive criticism rather than us being slated. Everybody can see what we’re trying to do and what we’re trying to grow.
“We can see that the Irish public and the Irish media is jumping on the ‘Green Wave’ and that’s what we want. Even though we’re disappointed now, we still know that we have a job to do this week and we still have the rest of the tournament to fix it,” Wafer declared.
*Aoife Wafer has been unveiled as Energia’s newest brand ambassador, further enhancing their commitment to powering the future of Irish rugby.
