a day ago
'People say treat the World Cup like any other game, but I want it to feel different'
BEIBHINN PARSONS REMEMBERS patting the turf behind her, wondering when her hand would locate a leg she already knew was broken.
It was a painfully familiar feeling. Just over four months earlier, Parsons had broken her leg at the Paris Olympics. She missed Ireland's remarkable WX1 campaign as a result and now, just two weeks into her comeback at the Cape Town Sevens last December, a tackle had triggered a crunch of bone and metal which told Parsons all she needed to know. The shock overrode the pain to the extent there was no scream, no shout for help.
'I just placed the ball back and play went on and on,' Parsons tells The 42. 'The physios didn't come on for ages and I sort of turned around and look at the bench and was like 'I really need some help here', because it wasn't about the pain, it was just, heartbroken, heart sunk, I can't believe I'm here again.'
The two injuries essentially wiped a year out of Parsons' career. She wasn't on the pitch when Ireland stormed to a stunning defeat of the Black Ferns at WXV1 last year, a tournament where Scott Bemand's resurgent side would finish second in the table – clear of Canada, New Zealand, France and the US. She sat out the entire 2025 Six Nations. Ireland's meeting with Scotland in Cork on 2 August will be her first international at 15s level since the 2024 Six Nations.
She returns to a group driven by a renewed sense of ambition. In a month's time Ireland open their 2025 Rugby World Cup pool campaign against Japan in Northampton, before games against Spain and New Zealand.
Parsons has the talent to be one of the tournament's standout players. There's a reason she debuted at Test level at the age of just 16, becoming Ireland's youngest international in the process. Now 23, the Ballinasloe native is able to look back at that time and acknowledge the strangeness of it all, a young girl entering an elite, adult sporting environment.
'It was definitely daunting at times,' she admits. 'I was so young that I couldn't share a room with anyone, there was this child protection thing. I never had a roomie, so I had to be so on it with the schedule and where to be and stuff like that. So I think a lot of the time I was just sort of like, 'Oh my God, where am I meant to be? What am I doing?' All of it was so new to me.
Advertisement
Parsons debuted for Ireland at 16. Tommy Dickson / INPHO Tommy Dickson / INPHO / INPHO
'It was a lot to take in all at once, but the team were great and I never really felt that young, no one really made me feel out of place.
'But I remember a lot of it was me cramming doing school work. Anna Caplice, she helped me with my German oral. I could drive at the time and gave one of the girls, Laura Feely lifts from Galway, but on the way up we'd be chatting here and there and it would come to a point and I'd be like, right, I have 40 minutes left in this journey, I'm going to pull into Applegreen and do some work for my Irish oral. A lot of it was me just trying to manage everything and get through school, and they helped me a lot with that. But I just kept thinking I'll probably be out by next week or I won't ever get selected, so it all sort of came as a shock.'
GAA had been the most prominent sport for the Parsons – Beibhinn is a cousin of former Mayo footballer Tom Parsons – but rugby was the game that captured her imagination. Having first played at U11s, it was U13s before she was part of an all-girls team in Ballinasloe.
'I remember my first season of playing with the boys. Honestly I don't think I knew a single rule. I don't even think I knew I was playing rugby, but I just remember it being loads of fun and it was something different and it was much easier than Gaelic football I thought at the time, just get the ball and run! I enjoyed it a lot.
'When I was playing for Ballinasloe I never felt like there was any barriers, I never felt like I was any different to the boys team because the coaches and the staff and the volunteers and the parents were just so committed to us playing and winning, and that's the way I still see it down there.'
As it happened, she was pretty good at getting the ball and running. Parsons played her way to trials with Connacht and was soon catching the eye of the international coaches. Describing her family as half GAA-mad and half not the slightest bit interested in sport, the rugby world was a new experience. That naivety sheltered Parsons and those closest to her from some of the hype which surrounded this rising talent.
'Not coming from a rugby household, they didn't know what (to expect)… Like this 'first cap' thing, that was a new phrase for us and it wasn't really bigged up at all. We didn't make it into this massive thing and a lot of it went over my head and in some ways I didn't take it all in, but I'm sort of happy for that as well because I think if I was to make my first cap tomorrow, I'd be so nervous and rattled and just make it into something that's absolutely massive, whereas it was like ripping off a band aid without even noticing it then.'
She now has 26 Test caps to her name, alongside her achievements playing Sevens – which included a run to the quarter-finals in last year's Paris Olympics. Before it came to such a cruel end, Parsons loved the Olympic experience, the sheer size and scale of the event fuelling her desire to help Ireland put a mark on this World Cup.
An event like that has the ability to bring out your best or bring out your worst and it's a decision to really embrace the occasion.
'That's one thing I thought I did in the Olympics, I just wanted to go for it. I really wanted to embrace the occasion and instead of going into my shell, come out of it. That's definitely the way I want to approach the World Cup.
'People say to treat it like any other game, but for me that doesn't work, I want to know that I'm at a World Cup and I want it to feel different and I'm not just playing a club team in some backyard, I'm playing for my country at a World Cup and I think you should embrace that, not shy away from it.'
The good news for Ireland is that Parsons' recovery has gone according to plan. She praises the work of IRFU physio Eduard Mias, who oversaw her rehab plan, but admits to moments of frustration during the long process of building her leg back up, which included re-evaluating her running technique during the three months where the plyometric speed exercises which help build muscle power were off the table. The work felt worth it when she clocked her top speed of 9 m/s again.
'That was a big like monkey on my back. Then I could sort of be calm about it and be like, OK, at least I'm not defected.'
Parsons faced two long rehab spells over the last 12 months. Bryan Keane / INPHO Bryan Keane / INPHO / INPHO
Just like her early days in camp, Parsons balanced her training load with her education. Studying Communications in DCU, Parsons' teammates became subjects for her dissertation – Relational Dialectics Theory in Elite Female Sport.
'I had focus groups of the girls,' she explains. 'The theory is just balancing tensions, so say with media it might be the tension of wanting visibility but also the want of having privacy and how you balance that, or does that come up for you? So we just figured out what sort of tensions there are, is it you want to be really strong, but you also want to be really feminine? These sort of tensions that are rising and how you navigate that really.'
Parsons knows what a good World Cup would mean for this Ireland team, who had the seismic setback of not qualifying for the 2021 tournament. Given the lows the women's game has experienced on this island over the years, she also know the potential effect it could have on the game in Ireland.
'Those two warm up games . . . it's been so long since I've been on a 15s pitch and those moments after when you're with kids and they've travelled to Cork or Belfast, they're the Holy Grail. You just want to give people as much time as you can in those moments because you never know what it is that'll spark it off for them that they're like, I want to go for this and be serious about it.
'I had a coach once, Aiden McNulty [former Ireland Women's Sevens head coach]. We were going to a Sevens World Cup and he gave this presentation on how World Cups have the potential to change lives, and that's something I keep thinking of. I know it was for a Sevens World Cup, but he talked about him watching soccer World Cups growing up and wanting that… A World Cup does have the power to ignite something within someone and it's definitely something I'm cognisant of.'
