Try Tag's British & Irish Cup is set to take place in Limerick, Ireland this weekend, 23rd-24th October.
After 2020's cancellation and a home victory for Great Britain in 2019, this year’s long-awaited competition is sure to excite.
The British & Irish Cup has been an annual highlight in the International Tag Rugby Calendar since 2013, bringing the best Tag Rugby players from the respective countries together to compete over six categories: Mixed Open, Men’s Open, Women’s Open, Mixed Seniors, Men’s Seniors and Women’s Seniors. Each category plays a best-of-three test series during the event, with the winning country being the one that wins the most categories (in the event of a tie it goes to number of games won).
Since its inception, the British & Irish Cup has been won by Ireland five times, with Great Britain finally toppling their undefeated run in 2019 with a 4-2 victory on home soil. This raises the question: can Great Britain make history by winning on Irish soil and retain the Cup for the first time ever?
Given the result in 2019 the anticipation for this year’s British and Irish Cup was always going to be high but, if anything, this has been magnified by the absence of International Tag Rugby since 2019. Both the 2020 British & Irish Cup and this year’s planned World Cup fell victim to Covid-19 with the World Cup now scheduled to take place in 2023. With this year’s British & Irish Cup itself having been postponed four times already, plus with all the challenges of training during a pandemic, the event has been a long time coming for the 140 Great Britain players (including 41 making their debut) travelling to Ireland this weekend. All the players and management teams are now just desperate to get out onto the field and to put all their hard work and training into practice.
Although the winners of this weekend’s games are far from set in stone, with many predicting an extremely close affair and even a possible 3-3 tie, one thing that is for certain is that this weekend will play host to plenty of exciting games and some top-shelf Tag Rugby. The Irish teams will again prove a steadfast opponent and will not want to lose two consecutive events or their unbeaten home record.
The full schedule of games taking place this weekend can be found HERE.
If you are not going to be in Limerick to watch the games in person, then you can still catch some of the action.
The Irish Tag Rugby Association will be live streaming all games on Pitch 1 from 9:45am on Sunday 23rd October and this will be available to watch from the Irish Tag Rugby Association Facebook Page at: facebook.com/tagrugby.
Give Tag A Try!
As well as running the Great Britain representative teams, Try Tag Rugby also run weeknight and weekend mixed, men’s and women’s leagues all year around across the country. As an inclusive and social sport, men and women of all standards are welcome to join a league.
To attend a Free Taster Session or to register for a league as a team or individual please visit www.trytagrugby.com.
