Ireland to wear navy shorts for Six Nations over ‘period anxieties’

If you’d forecast a few years back that one day the Irish Rugby Football Union would be tweeting about women’s “period anxieties”, you’d most likely have been on the receiving end of some quizzical looks. But as Irish international Vicky Irwin put it on Tuesday, “welcome to 2023″.

The IRFU announced that the national women’s team have chosen to change from their traditional white shorts to navy, a switch that is being facilitated by their kit supplier Canterbury in response to players expressing concerns about playing in white shorts during their period.

“The top way to ensure we perform to our best on the field is by removing any unnecessary distractions,” said Ireland’s Enya Breen in response to the announcement. “Wearing navy shorts instead of white is such a small thing, but for us it’s a big step from Canterbury and the IRFU. Our hope is that it will help women at all levels of rugby feel more comfortable on the field so they can get on with performing at their best in the game that they love.”

Such switches are becoming increasingly common in women’s sport, with Wimbledon announcing last November that it was easing its strict all-white dress code to allow female tennis players wear “coloured undershorts” in this summer’s Championships to “relieve a potential source of anxiety”.

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And at home, counties such as Antrim and Kerry have led the way in changing the shorts of their kits to darker colours for their women’s Gaelic football teams, with the trend growing too in soccer where clubs including Manchester City and Belfast’s Linfield have taken the same route.

The IRFU has, then, become the first of the Six Nations’ competitors to make this move, so they have very firmly entered 2023.