Twenty-one women sat on the steps of an old spiral stairway in a B&B in Edinburgh, Scotland on the night before Valentine’s Day in 1993. Every woman present said her name and the position she played. Introductions were needed because this was the first time they met as a group.
he Scottish lady who ran the guesthouse would come over and tell them that they had received another good luck message on the telephone from a well-wisher back home. They were on the eve of making history. The following day, they would become the first Ireland women’s rugby team to play an international game.
A 26-year-old Jill Henderson could barely sleep that night in the bedroom she shared with two other players. Alain Rolland was named the Ireland coach the previous month and Henderson said he was “very positive”. Rolland arrived late to the guesthouse that evening because he was at a game in Limerick earlier that day, after which he got a train to Dublin, a flight to Glasgow and a taxi to Edinburgh.
He named the team with Henderson the captain. As well as her talent as a flanker, Henderson – from Newtownards, Co Down – was one person who knew all the players before they came together on that spiral stairway for the first time. Henderson was a driving force behind making this international happen. She lived and studied in England and played with Waterloo at the time. She was offered a trial with England but turned it down because she wanted Ireland to be at the World Cup the following year and she wanted to be part of it.
That night, Henderson shared a bunkbed with Diane Nixon (who played with Oxford University) and they talked into the early hours. “I was thinking about the match and my after-match speech. I think I was probably freaking out a little bit,” laughs Henderson, who qualified as an architect and also became a counsellor. “Eventually, we got to sleep at some stage but the adrenaline was definitely pumping. I think I had a moment of: I can’t believe this is actually happening.”
Henderson had come through a lot to get to where she was that night. When she was 19, she arranged to fly to New York to work in a camp for kids for the summer. After getting off a bus in New Hampshire, she had a strange feeling when she got into a truck with the man who was there to collect her.
Her intuition was right. She says she was held captive in the camp for up to four nights, unable to leave. There was a German man and a few kids also held there. She says the only thing they were given to eat was ham sandwiches on one of the days.
Eventually, she managed to ring the police when she convinced her captor that they needed to go to the launderette and she escaped through a window and ran to a public phone. They were all rescued later that night. Did she fear for her life?
“Absolutely,” Henderson says. “I think there was a point when I thought, ‘Well, if I can survive that, I can survive any kind of thing.’”
Seven years later, Henderson couldn’t believe she was going to captain the Ireland women’s team in their first ever Test. There were five players who played with Irish clubs on the starting team including Tanya Waters (No 8), Joanne Moore (out-half) and Aoife Rodgers (full-back) with the rest of the players playing with English clubs. “I suppose we were a little bit like the Jack Charlton team of rugby at that stage,” Waters says.
Three years previously, Waters was at a college disco in Coleraine University one night when a club officer asked the women if they would play a rugby game the following morning against the visiting Warwick University team.
Waters had a few drinks but agreed to do something she’d never done before. Some of them turned up for the rugby game wearing plimsolls and t-shirts. The visiting team had gumshields and proper gear. They got “slaughtered”, Waters says, but rugby had her hooked from then on.
Rugby was big in Moore’s family in Blackrock, Co Dublin and she started playing in 1992. Rodgers grew up in Castletroy, Co Limerick. She loved watching the old Five Nations on TV but never thought rugby was a game that girls could play.
When she moved to Dublin to teach, she was buying her lunch in a shop one day when she heard a conversation that would change her world.
“I overheard a woman speaking about how her own daughter was very stiff and sore after a rugby match. And I thought to myself, ‘She must mean her son’. I, rudely or otherwise, interrupted and said ‘Sorry, did you mean your son or your daughter?’. She said: ‘My daughter’. I contacted the daughter and went training the following Friday evening.” That was the autumn of 1992. Just months later, having played less than a handful of games with Blackrock, she found herself on the Ireland team at the age of 22.
The Ireland Women’s Rugby Football Union (IWRFU) was formed in 1992. It was nearly another decade before it became affiliated with the IRFU and another seven years before it merged with the main union. “We never intended having an Irish team that fast (in 1993) but it was mainly driven by the girls who were in England and who were playing in the leagues,” says Nicola Doyle, IWRFU committee member, former Blackrock women’s captain and whose husband, Philip, was head coach of the Ireland women’s team that won the 2013 Grand Slam and reached a historic World Cup semi-final.
“We didn’t know what we were getting into (with the IWRFU). Nobody was telling us, ‘This is what you should do’. Nobody was overly enthusiastic about us either in Blackrock or in the IRFU. We had to earn our keep. And we had to show that we were there for the long haul even though we didn’t know what the long haul was”.
There were two ‘trials’ for the Ireland women’s team for this first international. The first was in Manchester five days before Christmas in December ’92 and the second was in Cooke RFC, Belfast on January 24 after which the squad was named.
The game was 21 days later. There was talk about having a training session with all the players but it didn’t happen. Unless they got sponsorship through their clubs, the women had to pay for their own travel and accommodation in Edinburgh. Waters took on the job of trying to get sponsorship for gear for the squad. Her persistence paid off with Smithwick’s agreeing to sponsor their Ireland shorts, socks, tracksuits, jumpers. And jerseys.
“They were men’s jerseys,” Rodgers laughs. “There was no such thing as a women’s jersey back in the day – shorts, the same – they were enormous.”
“I still have my jersey, its huge, you could set sail on it,” Moore says.
“I’m thinking that’s maybe my fault,” Waters smiles. “Because they probably did ask me what sizes would you go for? And being a No 8 with big shoulders and everything I would have said, ‘Oh well, forwards will be large’. But I was thinking large women as opposed to large men.”
“But the thrill of putting it on certainly outweighed any issues we had with them at the time,” Rodgers adds.
The players heard the rumblings in the background about women playing rugby. Comments like they couldn’t be taken seriously, it was a joke. The ‘will-they-be-exchanging-jerseys-with-their-opponents’ jibe.
“I suppose we were a novelty. While there might have been little undercurrents of ‘women shouldn’t play rugby’ or ‘it’s too physical’ and so on, not only did it not deter us, we just loved what we were doing so much,” Rodgers adds.
“Even though there were things that might have felt like – not roadblocks along the way – things like trying to find pitches to train on, trying to find changing-rooms to change in, trying to find hot showers on a Sunday and things like that, it just never ever occurred to you that this would stop you from continuing to play.”
And, so, on February 14, 1993, a nervous yet excited group of Ireland women began a journey into the unknown with their first international game at the historic Edinburgh Academicals FC, Raeburn Place which also hosted the first ever men’s rugby international between Scotland and England in 1871.
Reports in local Scottish newspapers have varying accounts of the attendance from between a few hundred to a thousand with players’ family members also there. Even though it was also their first international, the Irish players knew Scotland had a few months of training behind them and even had three coaches to Ireland’s one. Ireland came, they challenged but lost 10-0.
“Considering that we’d all met for the first time the night before, we actually played reasonably well,” Moore recalls. “I remember the warm-up, we were trying to learn calls. I was at number 10 – who would normally make the calls. You would try to link up with the scrum-half who I’d never played with before. Alain gave us some basic tips on what we needed to do.”
Waters, who has a recording of the game on an old video that needs to be repaired, says the Ireland team’s “mauling was just brilliant. We came very close to scoring a try with the maul at one stage. So, we did quite well, considering we were just all landed together for the first time”.
After the game, there was a dinner and speeches in the clubhouse. Henderson remembers getting “pretty emotional” during her captain’s speech. Having the role for that day was “really important to me, it’s part of my identity.” When they returned to Ireland, Henderson and Waters were invited on the ‘Kelly Show’ on UTV.
They were “the novelty”. Did Gaybo come calling? “No ‘Late, Late Show,’” Rodgers laughs. That game was the only one for the Ireland women in ’93 until the following year. She played in the trial in Cooke but Nicola Doyle missed out on the team but she travelled to Edinburgh to support her friends and Blackrock team-mates.
Even after that, there was uncertainty over what was coming next. “We didn’t know if there’d be a second game,” Doyle adds. That game was the first and only time Henderson captained Ireland as she went travelling to New Zealand to play rugby after completing her Master’s. She returned in time to play in the ’94 World Cup (which wasn’t officially endorsed by the IRB). That game in ’93 was also the first and only time Waters played for Ireland as she injured her cruciate knee ligament over a week later.
Rodgers went on to captain Ireland three years later and played around 14 internationals in total while Moore reckons she played 15 times altogether for Ireland.
A day they all remember with pride was Sunday, March 11, 2018 when the IRFU invited the team – and every player who represented Ireland women from 1993 to 2005 – to a ceremony to finally present them with their Ireland caps.
“That moment still wells me up,” Moore says, with her voice breaking. “The IRFU were the first union to recognise past players for international caps in the world. So, it was phenomenal that they stood up and said we’re going to give you these caps.”
No matter what else happens in their lives, these women will always be connected by that historic day on February 14, 1993. Because of their commitment and love of rugby, they helped build a stairway for others to follow.
“I would love to relive that day, over and over again. Oh yeah, I’d do things a little bit better,” Moore laughs. “The memory cells are not as sharp as they were way back then. But, looking back, being that trailblazer, I wouldn’t change it for the world.”
