IRELAND WOMEN’S HEAD coach Scott Bemand doesn’t expect the morale within his squad to be negatively impacted by the long-term injury sustained by Erin King.

While she played the full 80 minutes against the tournament’s defending champions, it was subsequently discovered King had suffered serious damage to her knee in the early stages of last Saturday’s 49-5 defeat to England in the Women’s Six Nations.

“She’s basically taken off a bit of cartilage off the back of her patella,” Bemand said, with surgery now required.

This will not only rule King out of the remaining two rounds of this year’s championship – including a showdown against Wales at Rodney Parade in Newport on Sunday afternoon – but also the Women’s Rugby World Cup that gets underway in August.

This could leave a considerable void given how impressive the flanker has been since making her debut at the international 15s grade against Australia last September, but this isn’t the only time in the recent past that Bemand has lost a key player to injury.

“The group are close and stuff like that does affect you, but there’s also a growing piece here with the group that we understand that injuries can happen. Sam Monaghan had a second bump and didn’t make the Six Nations. You kind of, as a group, learn to deal with the resilience of people being in for a game, being out for a game,” Bemand said.

“Occasionally it does happen that you get longer term injuries. I’ve got to say from the group, they’ve still come around her really well. Erin doesn’t want us moping. Erin wants us to go out and put out a performance this week.

“We’ll take a bit of Erin’s energy and we’ll bring it into training this week and we’ll take it to Wales with us. Because she’s still part of the group. She’s still around and she would want nothing more than for us to go and put out a good win in Wales.”

There is some encouraging news on the injury front for Bemand, however, as current squad captain Edel McMahon and Enya Breen have recovered from knocks that kept them out of the aforementioned England game and are set to be available for this weekend’s visit to Newport.

McMahon and Breen both featured from the start when Ireland secured a 36-5 bonus point win over Wales during the third round of last year’s Six Nations, but their Celtic counterparts have had a change of head coach since that heavy reversal at Virgin Media Park in Cork.

Taking over from Ioan Cunningham, Swansea native Sean Lynn assumed the Welsh hot seat on the back of guiding a Gloucester-Hartpury squad containing several Welsh internationals – as well as the Irish duo of Sam Monaghan and Neve Jones – to three consecutive Premiership Women’s Rugby titles from 2023 to 2025.

Former England women’s lead coach Bemand is familiar with the style of play that Lynn implemented during his time at the Gloucester helm, but he is keen for his troops to impose their own game as they search for a second win in the 2025 Championship.

“He [Lynn] has already tweaked some bits in how they play. They are starting to use the edge a little bit more, which is potentially a more exciting brand to watch.

“We got them over in Cork last year and we were able to get our brand over on them. It will be no different this week going over there. If we can impose our style on them we can create some problems.

“If we sit back away from home and invite them to show what they can do, then we will just make it more difficult for ourselves. We understand what they are trying to do and where the threats are liable to be and we are very confident that we can get our brand out there.”

Bemand was speaking to the media at the HPC a number of hours after the IRFU announced Johnny Sexton will be taking up a full-time position within the Union from 1 August of this year.

The former fly-half had been involved with the Ireland men’s senior squad on a part-time capacity, but in addition to becoming an assistant coach with that team, he will now assume an expanded role that will see him working with the various men’s and women’s national age grade sides up to senior level.

While Bemand stressed Gareth Steenson (a former Ireland underage colleague of Sexton) will continue to work with the Ireland women’s senior squad as a kicking coach for the immediate future, he is interested to see what the 39-year-old Dubliner might bring in his new role.

“He’s got a couple of things that he’s going to be doing first in terms of other environments. Currently we use Gareth Steenson doing the kicking with us and that will continue through to the World Cup. We’ll have touch points, it will be a collaborative effort,” Bemand added.

“There’s obviously a good number of pathway people coming through and utilising somebody like Johnny and Steenson’s skills within the pathway group, but Steenson will continue to do the kicking stuff with us through to the World Cup.”

Daire Walsh