But for me it is very uncomfortable, and it is not good for anybody to watch it in that fashion." "It just shows you that it is still at the very start. It is trying to push that over the edge so that actually happens and it is affordable to be able to sustain a professional team. ![]() "I think when they look at it in that fashion, the game is not generating a huge amount of money in Ireland, if any. "At that stage, we were getting 50 000 turning up to matches, and there was an awful lot of money being made. "I am not quite sure where I sit with this," Wood said. Greg McWilliams has suggested that some XVs professional contracts could be given out as soon as this year, and Wood believes that until that happens, watching Ireland face England is 'uncomfortable'. Money should not be the only factor to considerįor Wood, the argument around the financial viability of professional women's rugby should not be the sole determining factor about when Ireland steps into the professional scene. "That is the disparity that sits between it." It becomes pretty hard to maintain the level of almost onslaught against a team that is trained to be able to withstand all of that. "That's pretty much what happened at the weekend. We would play at a level of physicality so that they would stop at some stage. "The view that we took, and I took, was that we would remind them that we were professional and they were amateur. "They were an amateur team playing against us. "I was thinking of a game we played in the World Cup in 2003 against Namibia," Wood said. He explained how his side, who were professional, went out to physically prove that the amateur Namibia side were not able to compete with them. Wood was part of Ireland's World Cup squad in 2003 when they thrashed Namibia 64-7. While not all of his amateur teammates were sold on professionalism at the time, he was one of them that stuck with rugby over another career. Wood played for Munster, Ireland and the British and Irish Lions in both the amateur and professional men's eras. Professionals can go out to prove a point "You don't want it to be in the case where it is amateurs playing against professionals." ![]() So, what we see at the weekend is something that is inherently unfair and hopefully not dangerous. "The difference in this instance for me is that some of the teams in the world have gone professional and some haven't. "In terms of the amateur sense of it and the nature of the arguments that we were having with the IRFU, and so was every other team having it with their unions. "I likened the women's game to what the men's game was like when I started," Wood said. ![]() Speaking on Monday Night Rugby, Wood compared the game as it is now to when his Munster side were just starting to turn professional.
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