Cathal Dowd

Tramore star Orlaith McAuliffe will lead out the Irish women’s rugby league team as captain in a Test match against France in Dublin.

The game will kick off at 4 pm at the Garda Westmanstown RFC grounds. The Irish team is playing their first game since October last year, when they convincingly beat Greece 42-6 in their preliminary World Cup playoff game in Athens.

They face a France side travelling to Dublin, who lost their most recent game, also in October, heavily to the much superior England. They won’t be taken lightly, though, having already booked their spot in next year’s World Cup after they recorded back-to-back 58-0 wins against Serbia and Greece in their World Cup qualification group.

McAuliffe, a player for the Dublin City Exiles in the Irish Women’s Rugby League, is a PE teacher at De La Salle College in Waterford and travels back and forth between club and work. She spoke to WLR about the match today and how it felt to captain her country. “To get to be the captain today is just huge, it’s really big for me, my club, and my family, so I’m delighted and can’t wait to lead the girls today”, she said.

She felt her side was prepared to take on the challenge of Les Blues, having met up “every couple of weeks” recently to go along with a couple of camps since March.

With the very hot temperatures around the country sure to play a factor in the tie, McAuliffe said that her team has to be “really conscious about our subs, we have eight interchanges in the game, that is a big factor,” along with lots of water and electrolytes.

The squad selected for today consists entirely of players currently playing rugby league in Ireland or Britain, and is missing a few who play their rugby in Australia. The test match is part of their preparation for the Women’s Rugby League World Series in Canada this coming October, the final qualification stage for the 2026 World Cup.

Ireland missed out on automatic qualification by finishing second in their group to Wales. That required them to play Greece to progress to the World Series. The competition will see them take on Middle-East Africa winners Nigeria in the semi-finals.

“It’ll be a huge challenge for us, we have played Canada before and they have already been to the World Cup, so if we play them again that would be huge, but we have Nigeria first, so linking up with the girls based in Australia, getting them onside and getting us all training together will be important”, said the Waterford native.

But the challenges facing the team in Canada aren’t only the other teams at the World Series, as McAuliffe explains, even getting there isn’t smooth sailing, “We are funded by Sport Ireland but this would all need to be fundraised by ourselves. So we are looking at raising €30,000 just to get us over there, so that is part of the preparation unfortunately”.

She also believes it would be “huge” for rugby league if her side were to qualify for the upcoming World Cup. “A lot of people don’t even realise we have a team, it is still quite new, we played our first match in 2021, so for getting other girls involved, it’d be great for that, or getting a team in Waterford, or even in the South. It would be great just to grow the game and see it taking off”.

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