I love defending, says chart-topping tackler Neve Jones ahead of Italy clash

The 25-year-old Antrim hooker made more successful tackles — 23 — than any other player in the opening round of the Women’s Six Nations.

Three of those tackles were of the dominant kind, while she didn’t miss a single tackle in Ireland’s game against France (via Opta). Topping the tackle charts is nothing new for Jones. In 2023, she completed the most tackles — 90 — of any player and only missed two tackles in five games.

With a 5ft 1in, 72kg frame, Jones punches above her weight. She learned to tackle from her father David, who used to play rugby league and it’s something that “kind of comes naturally”. As natural-born tacklers go, Jones is right up there.

“I love defending,” Jones enthuses. “Playing mini-rugby I was the only girl and probably the smallest on the pitch, but it’s nothing that ever fazed me.

“I remember my dad taking me out to the garden and teaching me how to tackle and I think that it set me in good stead throughout all of my career.”

The upside of Ireland’s performance against France was their defence, the downside was their lineout. Ireland had the least successful lineout in last year’s championship and issues in this department continued in Le Mans, with Ireland losing four of their nine throws.

Not that Ireland were an outlier in this area. The usually excellent French lost two last weekend while England lost three in their game with Italy who Ireland play at the RDS on Sunday. Italy lost three of their 17 lineouts in their 48-0 defeat to England in Parma but the red flag for Ireland is they stole three of England’s. Jones is confident they will fix this for their first home game of the championship.

“Definitely. We have looked at what went wrong and what we can do to change that. Having looked at the analysis it should be going well,” Jones says.

“We have had two sessions with the lineout already and are making improvements, so it is just continuing on that through the week.”

The return of her Gloucester Hartpury team-mate Sam Monaghan to the second-row for Sunday should help solidify the lineout. Jones and Monaghan are among the seven players in the extended national squad who play in Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR) in the UK and so are not centrally contracted. Jones says she sees improvements in her team-mates who are on IRFU deals.

“The girls have gotten bigger, stronger, faster, it’s just fantastic to see that they have gone leaps and bounds since we left after WXV. It’s just pushing us on in the game to grow and be better and more of a challenge for everyone that’s involved.”

Last year, Ireland were beaten by Italy (24-7) for just the second time in their history. After their conservative gameplan against France, they want to show their attacking repertoire on Sunday.

“Probably off the back of having a big defensive set this week we’re probably looking more at attack because we know what we can do in defence.

“Dec (Declan Danaher, defence coach) has come in and given us a really great system. We’ve really bought into it. “It’s just flipping the switch a bit to be, well, ‘this is what we can do really good so how can we make our attack better via having such good defence?’.”

Defence or attack, keeping up with Jones is what the Azzurri will try to do.