The much maligned Women’s All Ireland League finished it’s regular season on Saturday 23rd March with UL Bohemian, Old Belvedere, Railway Union and Blackrock going forward to the league playoffs to see who will be crowned Champions of Ireland for 2019.

The semi finals will take place on Saturday 13th April as follows

Old Belvedere	–	–	Railway Union
UL Bohemian	–	–	Blackrock

These matches are repeats of the highly entertaining All Ireland Cup and All Ireland Plate finals that took place at Ashbourne on Saturday 30th March. The finals also featured an equally entertaining match between Cooke and Tralee in the All Ireland Shield.

With John Crothers, and to a lesser extent, Bob Given covering the bulk of our Women’s AIL matches this season, together with Beth Cregan tracking all the results every match weekend, it meant that I hadn’t viewed or followed as much Women’s AIL Rugby as I have on previous seasons,

However, the three matches on Saturday gave me a chance to calibrate against previous seasons and I must say I was impressed with the standard of rugby on view and the inclusion of so many young players in all the squads. It’s been a tremendous achievement by all the clubs, given that the IRFU Women’s program has drained more of the clubs’ resources and delivered less, in terms of international results, than ever before.

It was particularly disappointing that the Ireland Women’s program management team choose to blame the standard of rugby in the AIL as the reason behind their failings. However having viewed all the games on Saturday, alongside those others that I viewed during the season I have to say that the implication, that the AIL is not producing enough good players to perform at international level, is ill informed.

The Ireland Women’s program management team should look closer to home for their failings rather than blame the club players in Ireland.

We have already announced our prizewinners for the three categories that we, or should I say Beth, tracked throughout the season:

EMMA TAYLOR – WOMEN’S AIL PLAYER’S PLAYER OF THE SEASON

NIAMH BRIGGS – WOMEN’S AIL LEADING POINTS SCORER

DENISE REDMOND – WOMEN’S AIL LEADING TRY SCORER

Now that we have double and triple checked all our data we are happy to make available all Beth’s data on all the players who scored, or were nominated by the opposing team, throughout the season. For quick reference we’ve also summarised all stats by team at the bottom of this article.

AIL PLAYER’S PLAYER OF THE SEASON

EMMA TAYLOR (Railway Union)

There were 42 games scheduled, however due to non fields only 40 matches were completed. With two player nominations per match completed this means that there were 80 nominations in total.

Blackrock, Cooke and Old Belvedere received 12 player nominations each while Galwegians, Railway Union, St Mary’s College and UL Bohemian each received 11 player nominations.

A total of 48 individual players were nominated.

Huge congratulations to all the players that were nominated throughout the season.

AIL LEADING POINTS SCORER OF THE SEASON

NIAMH BRIGGS (UL Bohemian)

There were a total of 1,644 points awarded to the teams. 72 of these points were awarded for unfulfilled fixtures. This leaves a total of 1,572 points scored throughout the season, an average of just over 39 points per match played.

The breakdown of the points scored is as follows.

SCORE	TOTAL	AVERAGE PER MATCH
TRY	248	6.2
CON	124	3.1
PEN	28	0.7
POINTS	1572	39.3

There were 114 individual scorers, including one penalty try. All the individual scorers are listed below.

AIL LEADING TRY SCORER OF THE SEASON

DENISE REDMOND (Galwegians)

Only five players drop out of the scorers table when we look only at the tries scored. This leaves 109 individual try scorers and they are all listed below.

AIL INDIVIDUAL TEAM STATISTICS

All the above statistics are broken down by individual club and we hope that the clubs will use the stats for their own club awards.

A big FRU thank you to all the clubs that sent in their details on a round by round basis and a huge thanks to Beth Cregan for correlating all the results throughout the season.

I’m pretty sure that everything is correct except, perhaps, some of the spellings of the players names so if there are any mistakes please let us know on here or on Facebook.

Also huge thanks to Samurai Sportswear for stepping in at the last minute to sponsor our club coverage, we literally couldn’t have done this without them. Please support those that help us support you.

Lastly, thanks to all the players for another great season, it was good to see so many new faces taking part.