Scrum Queens

Ali Donnelly

Description

Scrum Queens: The Story of Women's Rugby, from 1880 to the Present Day charts the fascinating journey of women's rugby, from widespread social disapproval to the modern era of Olympic recognition and professionalism. Along the way, the book takes in all the major moments in the history of the women's game, from groundbreaking games during the war, to the first World Cup in 1991 and a momentous first appearance for women's rugby at the 2016 Olympics. There are stories of the pioneers who fought to get the game played in its earliest days, like New Zealand's Nita Webbe and France's Henry Flechon, while the more modern-day drivers of the game, like England's Carol Isherwood, also feature. Scrum Queens celebrates the success and heroics of the sport's top players and teams, with New Zealand's dominance of the game at every level alongside their long-time rivalry with England explored, along with the more recent successes of teams such as Ireland and Fiji, and the rise of the sevens game and its impact on women's rugby.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Rugby football

Informations

• Publié par: Pitch Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 25 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9781801503693
• Langue: English

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2022
Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Durrington
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
Ali Donnelly, 2022
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Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
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A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library
Print ISBN 9781801502290
eBook ISBN 9781801503693
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Contents
Foreword
Introduction
1. Kick-off
2. A rebirth
3. A decade of firsts
4. World Cup pioneers
5. The game gets organised
6. Growing pains
7. Baby steps
8. No going back
9. A game-changer in London
10. Sustained growth
11. Watershed moments
12. Dare to dream
13. The Olympic stage at last
14. Fallouts and world firsts
15. A whole new world
16. Hard lines and Covid chaos
Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Photos
Dedicated to the memory of my sister Denise, who had absolutely no interest in rugby, but who would have bought this book (or at least demanded a free copy) and pretended it was fascinating anyway. We miss you dearly.
Foreword
Stephen Jones, the Sunday Times
THIS IS the book that had to be written. It begged the author to do it. In a way it s the book that seals the first revolution in women s rugby and sets it up for a radical, wonderful and even-moneyed future. Ali Donnelly has been a player, coach, media manager, campaigner and journalist of renown for women s rugby - and almost all of this in her spare time - after professional duties and motherhood. Astonishing. Maybe the Irish have found a way of having more than 24 hours in a day.
And at the heart of it all has been Scrumqueens.com . Ali s legendary website is probably the most heroic operation I have ever come across in rugby and maybe in any sport, and it has bound together all the fledgling links in sport wherever they raised their heads.
It has been rightly lauded and awarded, has improved every year of its existence, and is now absolutely impossible to emulate. The ability to sniff out an international rugby match in the most remote countries, where you would least expect it, has become legendary. There is no question in my mind that she has been one of the true driving forces of the growth of the sport, equally as important as the great players.
She has had to be rugged, often had to swallow anger and pride, no doubt. She has been inexhaustible, needle-sharp; she has had the courage to speak out against those who felt that they had louder voices. And in doing so, she has proved her relevancy and campaigning brilliance. And she has given the sport worldwide a history, a reference and a sisterhood.
It was (frighteningly) 31 years ago that we at the Sunday Times concluded that we could no longer ignore the growth of women s rugby. We heard about the staggering efforts of the four heroes of the first World Cup led by Deborah Griffin. In the build-up to the final, in my first interview with a player - Sam Robson, the England centre - I remember her technical grasp of what England needed to do in the final against the USA, and how inspirational she was for her sport.
Some years after in England s north-west we went to interview a teacher, and England s captain, Gill Burns. How can anyone so modest, so quietly spoken, be such a global hero? No idea, but she managed it and her lovely mum still sends me a gorgeous home-made Christmas card every year.
More recently, after featuring scores of the game s giants in our newspaper, and finding every one inspirational in its own way, I collaborated with Heather Fisher in telling her retirement story. You try telling a story as incredible as Fisher s in only 1,400 words.
Women s rugby is ever-growing as a story. Sometimes is it The Story.
So sorry, Ali, we know you are frantically busy, but we also know that you were always going to write this and that so many people have been eagerly awaiting it. We also know that the book will provide another set of rock-solid building blocks for the runaway growth of rugby for women and girls.
The author reflects herein that sometimes; you can still come across people who challenge the right of women to play rugby. Well, they can read this, and weep.
Introduction
I GOT involved in rugby by chance.
We moved to a new area when I was 15 and the nearby town of Midleton in East Cork had a women s team.
Up to then I d largely been playing Gaelic football, but the travel to training was now a bit of a hassle and I thought I d try something else nearer to home.
I bumped into someone who mentioned the rugby team in Midleton and though I knew nothing whatsoever about the game, I decided to try a session.
I grew up in a house full of sport. All five of my brothers were involved in something - football, athletics, boxing and karate mostly, but never rugby. We considered it a posh sport, deathly dull with all its stoppages, and until I started to get involved myself, I don t think I d ever even met someone who played it.
I couldn t give you any detail about my first training session, but I knew immediately this was my sport.
Unlike the other teams I played in, where everyone was around my age, this was a group of women from all walks of life; women in their 20s, women in their 30s, mums, teachers, students, professionals, all who knew far more about life and rugby than I did. I was in awe.
Walloping the tackle pads, getting caked in mud, thumping a ball that could land anywhere off my laces, learning something new every single minute of every session. I was hooked and have been ever since. I quickly learned two things.
One was that if you wanted to play women s rugby in Ireland then - this was the late 1990s - you had to be prepared to travel. There were only about 12 teams in the whole country at the time and so 12-hour round trips to Belfast to play Cooke and regular trips back and forth from Dublin and Limerick became the norm.
The second was that people had surprisingly strong views about women playing rugby and a large number of those views were negative.
This was something of a shock to me. I d been playing sport for years and was oblivious to the idea that anyone would take issue with the involvement of women and girls. I d grown up mostly playing Gaelic football for my club Carrigtwohill, where if you got to a final, half the village would turn out to cheer you on.
If you won, you d thrillingly be driven in convoy up and down the main street hanging out the window, medals held high in the air and horns beeping madly before the lot of you clamoured into Frank s Chippers for chips and a potato pie. Yes, double potato. This was Ireland after all.
No one seemed to care that they were cheering on the U14 girls team. You were playing for the village and that was that.
But people did care about women playing rugby and many were stridently opposed to it.
This opposition meant that those who did play had to battle to do so.
This was not, I learned, a battle for equality, but rather a battle to simply be included and taken seriously.
After a few seasons with Midleton I moved to Cork city for university where I began to play at University College Cork and with a new club Highfield.
As I moved from my teen years into adulthood, I began to understand that my experience in the Carrigtwohill U14 team had been unusual - something reserved almost uniquely for the nature in which Irish towns and villages get behind their beloved local Gaelic teams, no matter what the age of the players or their gender.
The reality for the vast majority of women playing sport I quickly realised was quite different and women were in fact fighting everywhere just to be treated fairly - and in the case of women s rugby, often to simply not be laughed at.
My own rather na ve take on this then was that it was desperately unfair, and if only people would come and watch our games, then their minds would be changed. I hadn t of course reckoned with the fact that at the time, the standard of the women s game was unsurprisingly poor.
Rugby had a rich history in Ireland. The first men s Test game was as far back as 1875, but women had been largely shut out from the sport till the 1990s.
The teams I joined and played against in those early years were playing catch-up on a level that is hard to even quantify.
All of us were brand new to the sport - of course the standards were not comparable to the men s game, but endlessly compared we were, and it was maddening to me, as my eyes began to open to wider gender inequalities in sport, that we were so often treated as a novelty and not, as I had expected, as something to get behind and support.
This was true all the way to the top of the game, where the Irish Rugby Football Union (IRFU) at that point were barely involved at all.
There were outliers though, and I began to get to know some brilliant people who were doing their best to progress the game and get more women involved.
In 2001 I got an email from a man called Mark Andrews inviting me to join the committee of the group who ran the Irish women s game.
Mark was an influential figure in women s rugby in Ireland who had arrived from Australia in the mid-1990s when the Irish women s game was starting to get up and running.
He d become involved in every part of the game across the south-east of Irelan