Fifty-four points, eight tries, only their second away win in 12 games – it was, to put it mildly, a pleasant Six Nations trip to Parma for the Ireland women’s team. John O’Sullivan reports on a game that featured a hat-trick of tries from Anna McGann, “a display to savour” and “a complete team performance”, as player of the match Aoife Dalton described it. Ireland will, then, go in to their next game, at Musgrave Park on April 12th, with a spring in their step. They’ll need it too – their opponents will be England.
It was a considerably tighter affair at MacHale Park on Saturday, Munster holding off a Connacht fightback to win their URC meeting by six points. “Munster were the better team but Connacht really could have and ought to have won,” writes Gerry Thornley, not least because they had a man advantage for 55 minutes, Munster going down to 13 for a spell too. After the game, Gerry heard from a frustrated Cullie Tucker and a relieved Ian Costello.
Leo Cullen, meanwhile, was chuffed with his “relatively young and inexperienced” Leinster side getting the better of the Sharks in Durban, while Ulster saw off South African opposition too with a 38-34 win over the Stormers on Friday.
And Kerry saw off Mayo in the National Football League Division 1 final, Seán Moran reckoning that only the late great Micheál Ó Muircheartaigh, after whom the trophy has been named, “might have been able to inject excitement into the day’s proceedings”. Kerry’s “superiority smothered the match,” writes Denis Walsh, “if they had been clinical it might have been a rout”.
The other three divisional finals were livelier affairs, Gordon Manning reporting on a fine second-half display by Monaghan giving them a 10-point victory over Roscommon in Division 2, while Mickey Harte’s young Offaly side and Limerick took the Division 3 and 4 crowns.
And now for the football championship. The games that will define the chief contenders’ season are weeks away yet, so there will, Denis forecasts, be much talk of the championship “being held hostage by a provincial system that is no longer fit for purpose”.
In soccer, Manchester City’s FA Cup quarter-final win over Bournemouth on Sunday won’t put a gloss on a season that has, writes Ken Early, been “a textbook study in burnout”. “Few teams in the history of football have needed a break more,” he says, but instead, they’ll be off to America for up to six weeks for the Club World Cup, “a competition that exists purely as a device to enable Saudi Arabia to pump money into Gianni Infantino’s Fifa”.
In athletics, Ian O’Riordan reports on a successful inaugural Dublin City Half Marathon, just under 12,000 runners taking part, and in horse racing, Brian O’Connor has word on Dermot Weld “unwrapping” two classic prospects at Leopardstown on Sunday, Swelter and Tarima. “It all spelt massive encouragement for the perennial figure still mixing it at the highest level of the game after more than half a century.”
TV Watch: It was a lively old weekend on the Gaelic football and rugby fronts, and you can see the highlights of the former on TG4 and the latter on RTÉ 2’s Against the Head, both starting at 8pm.
