Positives for Ireland against Wales, despite penalty woes

Ireland played Wales in the first round of the Women's Six Nations, and the first game of Greg McWilliams’ tenure.

However, it wasn’t the start that any coach would have wanted. Ireland gave away their first penalty after just 12 seconds, on the way to losing the penalty count 14-5 across the whole game. The frustrating thing for McWilliams and the team is that many of these penalties were self-inflicted.

The breakdown area proved particularly troublesome for Ireland, repeating the same penalty concession a number of times. Whether Wales were trapping the tackler in the tackle area or not, Ireland continued to compete at the ruck to try to win turnovers. If the poaching player hadn’t competed for the ball, the referee would have given them more time to roll away from the tackle area and the game could have played on.

This is a difficult situation because poaching players see a window to win the ball back and they don’t always think about how their teammate is rolling away. If they have a look at their own player, it could be too late at that stage to win possession back. Although, you’d like for a team to read the trends of the penalty count as they happen and come to terms with which penalties the referee is focusing on during the game.

Conversely, a lot of the penalty count is in Ireland’s control and can be easily fixed ahead of their monumental task away to the inconsistent French team that ran away as convincing winners against Italy.

Bar a couple of scrum penalties, Ireland can work through of the penalties that they conceded. They gave away three penalties in the first four minutes and were caught for penalties and mistakes straight after scoring their own tries which allowed Wales an entry back into the game.

Wales had