There are not many circumstances in which striking one’s spouse could be chuckled away just an hour later, but the Moloney-MacDonalds are no ordinary couple. On Saturday afternoon, England’s Claudia and Ireland’s Cliodhna ran out at Twickenham on opposite sides of a Women’s Six Nations clash for the first time – and survived with their marriage, just about, intact. “I think it was a kick in the head,” Red Roses wing Claudia recalls of a mid-match ruck run-in with her other half. “She said she had no idea, but I said, ‘You kicked me then rolled over the top of me!’ It’s fine, we’re over it.”
Cross-country relationships are relatively common within the sport, particularly within Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR), the cosmopolitan English top-flight that draws from just about every top nation around the world. Claudia and Cliodhna met while at Wasps and have since been key figures down at Exeter Chiefs; international stalwarts for much of the last decade, the timing had never quite worked out for each to be fit, firing and in the frame when England faced Ireland at this stage of the year.
