Brittany Hogan has moved on from the 'what ifs' to the ‘what’s next’ as the Ireland back row recovers from knee surgery.
The Ulster number 8 was part of the Ireland squad that reached the quarter-finals of the Women’s Rugby World Cup against France last month and suffered an injury in the 58th minute that ended her tournament.
Scott Bemand’s side led 13-0 at half-time but didn’t score in the second half as Les Bleues racked up 18 points.
Late in the first half, Ireland put together a lengthy passage of play but were foiled at the line and that was the moment that stood out for Hogan as the biggest missed opportunity for the team to reach the last four.
"The feelings now are very different, I have that retrospective appreciation of what we’ve achieved," Hogan told RTÉ Sport.
"We’ve come home and seen the impact of what we achieved.
"I’d be quite good at putting a positive spin on things, so I developed that quickly but the first couple of days and weeks after were not great.
"It was filled with ‘what-ifs’. We worked seven years for a tournament where we came so close to hitting our goals.
"If we had scored in that first half, those 30-odd phases, if I hadn’t done this would it be different, all these ‘what-ifs’ come into your head. It was more about letting down your team-mates that hit me."
The 27-year-old Co Down woman is out of action for about three months, she revealed.
"I hurt myself in a ruck so it could have been a lot worse, it was an isolated MCL tear," she said. "I got the surgery and anchored it back on and hopefully be back in contact in about 12 weeks."
That will put the Old Belvedere forward in the frame for the start of the Celtic Challenge around Christmas.
The competition’s future is uncertain after this coming season with concerns over the disparity between the Irish and their opponents with the Welsh and Scottish teams not using most of their international players.
Hogan says that the Ireland team benefited from the structured and intensive training schedule that her Wolfhounds and the Clovers teams underwent.
"[It’s a] good competition but doesn’t have the opponents or quality or standards that we had in the World Cup," she said when asked if a switch to the PWR in England, like team-mates Aoife Wafer, Dorothy Wall and Neve Jones, could be on the cards.
"The big thing was working together, the two years together has accelerated the performances we’ve had by playing with each other week in week out," said Hogan, capped 38 times since making her debut in 2020.
"We know each other inside out. The World Cup gave me the hunger to play top-class opposition all the time.
"If that means staying in Ireland and putting my hand up for international and Six Nations selection, pushing myself in training as much as I can then so be it, or if that means going a different avenue, maybe that’s for me.
"At the moment, I am just thinking about my knee and coming back. Where my path takes me, it takes me but I want to experience that [top level] mental and physical challenge.
"I’m at that point of my career where if I don’t I might...like I want my performance to keep improving and improving."
The task for Irish women’s rugby now is to build on the positive vibes of the World Cup, and ensure the ‘green wave’ keeps rolling.
Hogan, a Tackle Your Feelings ambassador, said increasing the player pool is vital to take Ireland, who will host a first ever standalone Test at Aviva Stadium against Scotland in the Six Nations next spring, to the next level.
"For high-performance, it’s building that player pool," said the former Sevens player. "You can see for England and Canada, how good having a 32-player squad is.
"For us to last six, seven, eight games at a World Cup, you can’t rely on 15 people so we need to make sure we are investing in our young players coming through. Since Scott came in and us beating New Zealand [in 2024], investment and influence has just skyrocketed.
"We’ve shown we’ve improved in a short period of time, so it’s just asking for more, and being hungry for more investment and people to back us.
"Hopefully all the people who came to the World Cup will stay with us and be in the Aviva.
"We want as many people as we can get at that game."
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