“It’s been an amazing experience, and my first as a coach in this tournament,” Wakley says. “We’ve got a number of players involved for the first time too, so it’s been an exciting challenge.”
Many may have predicted purely one-sided encounters in Wales’ first two pool matches against New Zealand and Canada in Dublin, but the women in red more than rose to the occasion against two of the top three sides in the world. Besides, results notwithstanding, Wakley feels the players have made significant strides in their development.
“The past four games may have taken a bit out of them in terms of physicality, so we’ve been looking to refresh them and pick them up for what is an important stages of the World Cup for us. We want to finish strongly against Ireland on Saturday afternoon.”
As soon as their World Cup pool was drawn, the Wales coaches were under no illusions as to the scale of the challenge ahead. A warm-up fixture, to be held behind closed doors, was pencilled in with number one seeds England leading into the competition
“You only get better by playing the best teams in world, that is a fact,” states Wakley. “For us to play England in a warm-up game, followed by New Zealand and Canada in consecutive matches – that’s four games against the top three – means we’re in a position where we’re finding out a lot about the players, pushing them to places they’ve never been before.
“Most will never have experienced this sort of fixture congestion, and that’s not to mention the intensity. We’ve got a lot of visual learners in the side, and being young, we’ve got to spend a lot of time on individual reviews as well as team reviews. We know the players are getting better and will be better for it. We are fixing the fixables, and putting things in place to help us see out the World Cup on a high.”
Playing on the biggest rugby stage of all can do wonders for a player’s development, says Wakley: “You can’t emphasise enough how beneficial that is for a player. You get used to playing in front of the crowds, standing in front of the haka, for example. These are things players need to do so they’re not overawed by any situation they’re going to face in the future.”
For Wales, today is all about the seventh-place play-off against the hosts, whom they have faced twice already this year. A pre-Women’s Six Nations warm-up victory in Donnybrook was followed by a narrow loss at the BT Sport Cardiff Arms Park. “The Six Nations match was a tight one, but the girls really fronted up after two bang-average performances prior to that. A lot of those ghosts have now been laid to bed.”
What’s his assessment of the hosts? “They’re having some tough press at the moment, but their coach has done great things on both the sevens and 15s front with Ireland. You only need to look at the players on the sevens series to see that they’re exciting talents.
“Obviously with the pressures that come along with your own World Cup, it can affect them. They’ve lost some key players, but so have we, and we’ll now get to see how far we’ve actually come from the Six Nations, because I definitely believe we’re in a different position from five months ago.”
Wakley admits that Wales would have drastically exceeded expectations if they had reached the semi-finals, “but we are where we are, and this opportunity to play Ireland is coming at the right time. We’ve had a couple of injuries, but our medical and S&C teams have been exceptional. We’re excited to go out on a high, with the added incentive of people playing their last international game, which is going to be huge motivation for them.”
Ireland v Wales at the Kingspan Stadium kicks off at 14:00 this afternoon, and will be streamed live on the S4C website and S4C Chwaraeon Facebook page.
