Eve Higgins says decisions around whether or not Sunday's game against Italy will be the last TikTok Six Nations match for her and her sevens colleagues is above her pay grade.
The Kildare winger is one of several contracted players who, as indicated by head coach Greg McWilliams, are likely to miss out on the final two matches of the championship, against England and Scotland, as the short-form squad head for Canada for the Langford leg of the World Series, which starts on 30 April.
Asked if she knew her itinerary after Sunday’s game against Italy, who like Ireland have lost both their opening ties, Higgins deferred to the discussions between the high-performance director David Nucifora, sevens coach Aiden McNulty and McWilliams.
"David, Aiden and Greg have all been in talks and there is great clarity between them," she said.
"Greg made it clear at the start of the Six Nations that us sevens and 15s players, there is no distinction between it.
"To be honest, I’m just focusing on this weekend ahead and not focusing on far ahead. When that will come, that will come.
"I’m not looking ahead at the moment but obviously as a player, you’ll do what’s best for the programmes.
"We do have a World Cup that we’re trying to qualify for in 2022 with regards to sevens.
"And this is obviously our first World Series after Seville and Malaga [where Ireland reached the final] so we’ll see what happens but, yeah, we’ll just do what’s best for the programmes."
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What’s best for the "programmes" might not necessarily be what’s best for a team looking to gain a foothold in the public consciousness after a harrowing year on and off the field.
All that, however, will come into sharper focus following the match-up against the Azzurri, who Ireland beat 15-7 in the World Cup qualifying tournament last year.
The job at hand is to shore up a badly struggling lineout and scrum, make huge improvements in basic catch-pass skills, and beat the visitors to Musgrave Park in a game that has been described as "must-win".
"The [27] handling errors is something that we really want to improve on this weekend," said the 22-year-old, who grabbed Ireland’s only score in the 40-5 loss last Saturday.
"We’ve seen both in the France game and the Wales game that when we have opportunity with ball in hand, we can see how threatening our attack can be, both forwards and backs combined.
"We can take a lot of encouragement and positives from that and just trying to get more opportunities like that this weekend.
"I suppose the positives we have as a backline is that a lot of us are very familiar with each other and can play off each other quite well.
"Even the likes of me and Stacey [Flood, another seven player] in the centre, last weekend was only the second game we were together in a partnership in the centre but we’ve been playing together for the last five or six years so we know each other quite well.
"It’s a lot of new details that we have come up with but we do have that reassurance that we know each other quite well."
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