Lisa Fallon: Stephen Kenny’s men need results; Vera Pauw’s women need resources

With time to reflect on the positives of 2021 and the opportunities that 2022 can bring, it’s fair to say it’s been a year of progress for our national teams and, on the domestic front, particularly for the women’s game.

A painful teething process for Stephen Kenny’s team continued with a rollercoaster journey from the very deep low of the home defeat to Luxembourg in the March World Cup qualifiers to a year-ending run of four games which included three wins and a scoreless draw with Portugal. Ten goals were scored in those games and none were conceded.

The real litmus test for the team begins in earnest in June 2022 as Ireland embark on an important Uefa Nations League campaign that could pave a path to to a Euro 2024 play-off place.

And it’s in this campaign that the narrative around the team will change, from the “development and integration of young players” to the fair expectation that Ireland should be capable of winning games against teams that are beatable.

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Ireland are third seeds in the group and face Ukraine, Scotland and Armenia. Kenny has stated he believes Ireland can top the group and it is fair to have those aspirations. I think its time for Irish football to put this type of pressure on itself and embrace what it takes to aim a little bit higher.

It’s the same for the women’s national team, who are in an excellent position in their bid to secure second spot (and a play-off place) in their World Cup qualifying group. Vera Pauw’s charges ended the year with a disappointing 1-1 draw at home to Slovakia, but followed it up with a record-breaking 11-0 victory over Georgia.

Again for this team, the narrative has had to change this year. With huge buy-in from the public, this squad of players have engaged the interests of women’s football in this country in the overall football conversation. Qualification for a major tournament would be a game-changer and would escalate the profile of, and opportunities within, women’s football – forever.

Bedrock

With the implications of Brexit, never before has it been so important for what’s happening on the ground in this country to be the bedrock of our talent production.

If domestic football is in a good place, then national team football will be too. If underage football is strong, then it will follow that senior levels will be too.

For the top level of the game to be strong and to facilitate high performance, a lot of important work goes on behind the scenes and under the radar. Often the things that matter a lot are never really seen.

This week, though, there was an important development for the women’s game in Ireland that deserves to be recognised.

A piece of research has been undertaken by Dan Horan, head of research at the FAI, with the support of some very esteemed colleagues, on injury surveillance in the Women’s National League (WNL). It follows on from similar studies in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and the United States.

The reason this type of research is important is because it creates authentic benchmarks from which the game can be measured and developed. For far too long, the women’s game has been benchmarked against what happens in the men’s game but, in the last five years particularly, this is changing.

And even then, you still cannot directly compare what happens at the “elite” level in say, Sweden, with what happens at the elite level in Ireland because the women’s games in both countries are at different stages in their development. You would be comparing a full-time professional league with a part-time set-up so it’s not like for like.

The study found the match injury incidence rate in the WNL was 7.5 times higher than the training injury rate which asks the question if training sessions are preparing players adequately for the demands of match play, particularly the demands of high-speed running and sprinting.

Coach development

This type of research also helps in terms of coach development because it means a purposeful and relevant focus can be placed on the construction of the training sessions, and this in turn will develop the standard of the game here and take it up another level.

The study also found that ankle, knee and thigh injuries are the most common in our leagues’ female players, but injury prevention programmes in female footballers have also been developed globally and they could be applied here, as they have proved to be very effective.

One of the biggest challenges here, though, is the resourcing of support staff for our WNL clubs. Every team should have a physiotherapist/S&C coach at every match and training session as a minimum requirement to provide early interventions and to supervise more comprehensive return-to-play pathways.

This requirement is further evidenced by the finding that Irish players who play at international level as well as in the WNL have a lower injury incidence rate than those who only play in the WNL, despite the fact that international players average 70 per cent more match play that non-internationals.

So, the more matches you play, the stronger you become.

What is also interesting is the findings of a paper published recently by Dr Joanne Parsons and her colleagues in the British Journal of Sports Medicine which intimates that the cause of ACL injuries in female players is strongly influenced by what they call “gendered environmental disparities”.

In other words, female players do not get access to the same level of expertise, medical interventions or sport science as male players do, and as they get older, they are most at risk of ACL injuries because they don’t get the opportunities to develop the same levels of strength and get the same levels of game exposure as male players do. Horan’s study found that ACL tears accounted for 28 per cent of all the time lost to injury in the WNL.

This is not just an Irish issue. When all the players who participated at the 2019 Women’s World Cup were surveyed, it was found that one-third of the players did not have access to a dedicated physiotherapist at their club team, and almost 50 per cent did not have access to a sport scientist or S&C coach.

It is very important that decision-makers in Irish sport take notice of findings such as these because if we are serious about high-performance sport here, it is crucial that resources are made available so that female players and athletes can achieve their potential.

In a year where women’s sport in Ireland showed what can be done against the odds, imagine what could be achieved with better resources and opportunities – with the things that can be controlled.

This research on injuries in the WNL was funded by the Irish Research Council and was a research partnership between the FAI and UCD