When the Irish women’s rugby game against Australia was announced earlier this year, Munster’s Eimear Considine intended to watch from the stands. Now, 10 months post-ACL operation, she starts at fullback against the Wallaroos on Saturday afternoon in Belfast.
“I remember saying ‘that’d be class to go to’ and had pencilled it in my calendar to go as a spectator. I’d be going regardless of whether I’m on the team or not.”
The call about potentially earning her 27th cap came at an inopportune time, but she made it work. Her baby Caolán, born in January of last year, was “roaring in the background. ‘Sorry Scott [Bemand]. Sorry guys. It’s dinner time here’. They got a snippet into the chaos of my life, but it was unbelievable.”
“I couldn’t really be excited in the moment because so much had to happen, I couldn’t give him an answer straight away because there was a lot of logistics.”
She last played for Ireland in April 2022, eventually being stretchered off in a 69-0 defeat to England in the Six Nations. A baby and an ACL tear later, she felt physically and mentally different.
During her pregnancy, the realisation came quickly that life as she had known it was over, and with it, the blinkered mindset of an elite amateur athlete.
“My life and my lifestyle changed, I found that quite hard. Dean [Ryan] was still playing with Na Fianna in Dublin at the time and they were training however many times a week. My club was in Limerick and I wasn’t able to go up and down for training.”
While her team-mates played together, a pregnant Considine – who’d always intended to return to rugby – trained alone without a clear, incremental plan in place. “I was healthy during my pregnancy and lucky that I was able, but I was just guessing. I knew what a weight session, a running session looked like, but I didn’t know if I was actually allowed to do this. There’s so much mixed messaging.”
“You’re worried about anything going wrong, you don’t want to push it too hard. I did what felt right, judging my own body. There was no programme, no ‘do this, don’t do that’. There was a lot of grey areas and this lack of research around it.”
“Before, as an athlete, I was number one and my prep was very much about me.”
Of course, as parents know, everything changes when a baby arrives. “Your mindset completely flips the minute he’s born. He is the most important thing in your world. I didn’t care about rugby. It’s the weirdest thing in the world that you’re just handed this child and then it becomes your everything.”
After the initial post-partum recovery, her goal remained to get back playing, even though the path to the pitch wasn’t direct.
“Thousands of people do their ACLs and recover and there’s so many studies done,” says Considine, but adds it was difficult to find protocols for returning after pregnancy. “I had researched stuff, I’d Google stuff, I downloaded articles, journals around how to return to sports after having a baby.”
“Obviously now having gone through it, every pregnancy, labour and recovery is different. I understand why there’s no one-shoe-fits-all approach, but it was a mixture of me knowing and listening to my body, reading a few journals, doing what this person said, taking a bit of this, a bit of that, going week-by-week and using the experience that I had in elite sport to judge how I felt.”
However, even with all that, she was still parenting a newborn and so her recovery wasn’t, couldn’t be, optimal.
“I could come to training and have been up three times in the night with the baby. It was knowing that I hadn’t got the adequate sleep or eaten as much as I should have.”
Then, in September 2023, she tore her ACL. At that point, she was technically still in post-partum recovery.
It was this ACL injury, and the thoughts of that gruelling comeback, where Considine initially faltered. “I thought ‘that’s it, I’m done, I’m retired, I’m finished. That’s how I’ll finish my rugby career‘.”
But her intrinsic competitiveness kicked in with the structured ACL recovery programme, wanting to consistently hit and improve upon the targets, and there was the support of her physiotherapist Ciarán Purcell and Munster S&C coach Lorna Barry to keep her motivated. “I wanted to get back on the pitch fully and be able to play.”
Parenthood also brought a new perspective. “Rugby wasn’t a priority. I actually think that helped me in my recovery, that I thought, ‘if it works out, it works out and if it doesn’t, it doesn’t’. It’s given a different perspective on life that I still get to go home to him.”
Once she made it to the pitch – nine months after her ACL operation – the goalposts moved to playing for Munster.
Playing for Ireland was something she’d only mentioned to Dean, too vulnerable to say it aloud. “It’s like ‘how can you play for Ireland when you haven’t even played for Munster?’ Or ‘you haven’t played at club level?’”
Despite all the changes of the last few years, when she got Bemand’s call, her support remained the same.
“Dean straight away was like, ‘if you’re doing this, you’re doing it right. There’s no crying about him, there’s no missing in him, there’s no missing us. You’re going up there and you’re going to do the best you can and make it work while that you were away and enjoy it’.”
Even still, she was “very nervous going into camp”, which felt like the “first day of school all over again”.
There were apps to download, a new level of professionalism, more time to train, more focus on recovery, a longer camp.
But if camp has changed, so too has Considine. She isn’t usually emotional, but then she doesn’t usually have to recover from an increasingly prevalent injury in women’s sports while balancing it with parenting, being a teacher, and trying to make the team.
“You don’t think you forget easily but you do. You forget the pregnancy, and the hard times through that. You forget the loneliness, and the comeback, how crap I felt, how I had no core, no speed, how I wasn’t fit, how I then got back. And then doing the ACL and the slog in and out of the gym three mornings a week, you just kind of forget all that.
“It’ll be emotional, no doubt, if I do get to wear that Irish jersey again.”
She will do just that on Saturday as someone who embodies the lows of injury, the highs of motherhood, and the challenges of both to make it back, someone who tried.
