We are looking to make Tuesday our Women’s Rugby Day on The Front Row Union so, for the remainder of this season we’ll be publishing the bulk of our women’s content on Tuesday mornings, plus we’ll look at bringing in regular features on the Women’s game.

Unfortunately, we had planned to have two AIL Cup match reports to help launch this new initiative but both of our featured matches. Malone v Cooke and Ballynahinch v Blackrock were cancelled at the weekend due to frozen pitches  so our first stab at this is going to be decidedly underwhelming!

The match between Malone and Cooke has been rearranged for tomorrow night, Wednesday 10th January, at Gibson Park. Kick off is at 19:00.

The match will feature an enticing head to head between Ulster hookers Neve Jones at Malone and Beth Cregan at Cooke in a match that should be a fairly spikey affair in general, though Cooke would still be regarded as clear favourites.

In the four matches that were played there were two substantial upsets with two AIL sides knocked out. We’d predicted possible upsets at Shannon and Ballincollig and it was the players at Shannon who produced the goods with a convincing win against, their AIL opponents, Galwegians down in Limerick. : 😯

In the all Munster affair, down in Cork, Ballincollig came up short against their illustrious opponents Highfield, but in an all Leinster match up, in Dublin, former AIL club St Marys pipped, the team that replaced them in the AIL, Tullamore by a single point in what will have been a big disappointment for the Offaly outfit who had started to get their AIL campaign on track.

The results for the matches that were played at the weekend are as follows.

Ballincollig RFC	0 – 13	Highfield
Rathdrum RFC	0 – 71	Old Belvedere
Shannon	36 – 21	Galwegians
St. Mary’s	23 – 22	Tullamore

With defending champions UL Bohemian and fellow AIL high fliers Railway Union receiving first round byes the draw for the Second Round of the All Ireland Cup is as follows.

Old Belvedere	v	Shannon
Railway Union	v	Ballynahinch / Blackrock
UL Bohemian	v	St Marys
Malone/Cooke	v	Highfield

The losers from Round One go into the draw for the All Ireland Plate as follows:

Rathdrum RFC	v	Galwegians
BYE	v	Ballynahinch / Blackrock
BYE	v	Tullamore
Malone/Cooke	v	Ballincollig RFC

All matches to be played on or before the 4th February.