After all these years of asking for more, it’s churlish to complain when the Women’s Rugby World Cup delivered so much in one weekend. England’s victory pulled in two-and-half million prime time viewers on the BBC, 85,000 fans turned out across the four grounds, including a record-breaking 42,000 crowd in Sunderland, five hat-tricks, four packed fan zones, free concerts, and all those fireworks. It had almost everything anyone could have wanted. Almost. The one thing missing was a tight finish. The closest of the eight games was settled by three tries and change.
The success of the World Cup isn’t just going to be measured by what happens on the weekends, but in the days in between them. World Rugby wants people to be talking about this tournament when they go into work on Monday morning. And for that to happen it needs some jeopardy.
There were 72 tries in eight matches altogether, but 66 of them were by the winning team. England scored 11, so did Australia and Canada. South Africa scored 10. New Zealand eight. Blowouts happen in the pool stages of every Rugby World Cup: there were a bunch of one-sided matches in the men’s tournament two years ago, when France beat Namibia 96-0, New Zealand scored 96 against Italy and Ireland defeated Romania 82-8. The difference this time was in what happened in between. The matches that we hoped would be close turned out anything but, with Scotland beating Wales 38-8 and France beating Italy 24-0.
Which didn’t surprise anyone who regularly watches women’s rugby, but maybe requires some explaining to the huge new audience who are only just discovering it.
“The numbers don’t always tell the full story,” said World Rugby’s director of women’s rugby, Sally Horrox, when she was asked about it this week. Horrox argues that 49% of women’s rugby fans have come to it in the past two years regardless of how uneven the standard. These scorelines don’t necessarily stop the games from being entertaining. And she’s right, the Red Roses’ victory was as good as a one-sided game gets. No one at the stadium felt it suffered from being so predictable. Like the competition director, Yvonne Nolan, said, there was a lot of “fast, free-flowing rugby”, and plenty to admire in the way the losing teams played.
But it’s true, too, that no amount of fireworks or free concerts can disguise the gaps between some of these teams. Women’s rugby needs the enthusiastic support of the media as it grows; its lack of visibility is, World Rugby argues, the biggest obstacle to its success. So there are good reasons why a lot of what is written and said about the women’s game tends to gloss over the obvious imbalances between the teams. The irony is that it’s a sign a sport has matured that everyone involved is able to be honest about what everyone’s watching, instead of celebrating the simple fact that so many people are.
To their credit, Horrox and Nolan are both too smart to pretend anything else. They don’t shy away from speaking about the lopsided results, which are inevitable given the uneven pace of development in women’s game around the world. “These teams,” as Nolan says, “are all at different stages of their journey.” Women’s rugby is growing so quickly that the gaps between the teams are actually wider now than they were during the first tournament, back in 1991 (when only one match ended with a 50-point margin) because a handful of sides, and England in particular, have raced so far ahead.
This Saturday, a Red Roses side, who have the benefit of all the expert coaching, medical support and sport science the Rugby Football Union can provide and who, because the country has one of the two professional domestic leagues in the world, are paid to play and train seven days a week, take on Samoa, who don’t even have national contracts, and whose team include a full-time property manager, police officer and primary school teacher, who all had to rely on donations to cover the lost income they have suffered by missing work to compete in England.
Which invites the question of which is the better achievement, an overwhelming victory for the professionals or an honourable defeat for the amateurs? If they’re honest, the Red Roses will know that given their pedigree and the resources at their disposal, they made too many basic mistakes even when they beat the USA by 62 points. And that, too, may be the result of the fact that they have had so few close matches in recent years that they have been able to get away with being sloppy.
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World Rugby is doing what it can to help narrow the gap. It has provided all the smaller teams with access to a pool of nine specialist coaches, who work across set pieces, skills, and strength and conditioning, Alain Rolland has been brought in to work with them on how to reduce their penalty counts.
But they can’t cover everything. Even Canada, who are one of the strongest teams in this tournament, had to crowdfund the last $1m of the $3.2m they needed to compete.
But in the long term, a lot of this will come down to the hard work of widespread structural change, the small steps forward in between the tournaments, as well as the great leaps made during them.