Former Ireland and Lions international Hugo MacNeill believes women’s rugby can expect to compete with the men’s game for television audiences in the future.

Speaking about the future of sport on the Saturday Panel, MacNeill shared his views about how the sport of rugby, in particular, is keeping women involved at the highest level of sport.

“We’ve seen that  [the potential] in rugby and it’s been phenomenal through the World Cups,” MacNeill said.

“And obviously the Irish team had a little bit of difficulty in the World Cup and recently. But this has been a phenomenal success.

“I remember going to the final and semi-finals in Belfast and they were the best rugby games I saw last year.

“And I remember a couple of years ago when the Ireland team were honoured and Niamh Griggs – the captain – was chatting away about being in France when we beat the All Blacks and reached the semi-finals of the World Cup.

“And I had to stop and take the microphone and say, ‘the audience have never heard an Irish captain say that we beat the All Blacks and got to the semi-final’.

“But there’s a really important point about this. The SRI did a study a few years ago about children dropping out of sports and at what stage did they start dropping out. And a big thing for girls in their teenage years, [was that] they played the traditional sports of hockey and netball; girls were saying this doesn’t do it for me.

“And so when you have sport like rugby where you can not only represent your country [but] you could be European or world champion - that was a really powerful message.

“Having seen the potential of women’s rugby at its best, I think there’s huge potential, and absolutely in its own right.”

Written by James Hopper