Paula Fitzpatrick wins Sportswoman of Month award

The Irish Times/Sport Ireland Sportswoman Award for February has been won by Ireland rugby star Paula Fitzpatrick.

It was earlier this week that former Ireland captain Fiona Coghlan, in a panel discussion at the launch of #SupportHerSport, reflected on the progress made by the national team in recent years, from being Six Nations also-rans to winning the Grand Slam in 2013 – having never finished higher than third until then – and winning the title again in 2015.

It’s a measure of the standards the team has now set itself that, having reached those heights, there’s no great satisfaction with their 2017 Six Nations campaign so far, despite them winning all three of their games.

Those victories have left them level on points at the top of the table with England, who they play on St Patrick’s Day in a potential Grand Slam-decider – but only if Ireland can first beat Wales in Cardiff on Saturday. And having lost to the Welsh in a warm-up game in January, admittedly with seven uncapped players in the squad, victory in Cardiff won’t be viewed as a given.

Results wise, then, it’s been a perfect start to the campaign, but the performances have been anything but convincing, a last-minute Jenny Murphy try needed to scrape past Scotland, a desperately poor first half away to Italy rescued by four second-half tries, and unforced errors again a feature in their 13-10 win over France in Donnybrook, the wintry conditions hardly helping.

But as the old chestnut goes, if you can keep on winning without being at your best, grinding out results to keep you in the Grand Slam hunt, then there’s plenty of room for optimism if the performance levels can be lifted.

The very point was made by the Irish number eight Fitzpatrick, the 31-year-old Dubliner who has stepped in to Niamh Briggs’s captaincy shoes. If you can eke out wins “even playing below your standards”, she said, then “that’s a huge thin