England’s two World Cup-winning captains on the changing face of women’s rugby
Within seconds of their faces coming into focus on screen, Karen Almond is telling Katy Daley-Mclean: “My dad sent me articles about you. He used to say we were quite similar – ‘Ooh, that No 10 who plays for England just like you did…’”
This is the first time the pair have met, albeit over video call rather than in person, and they certainly have a lot in common. Their birthdays are just a day apart – Dec 18 for Almond and Dec 19 for Daley-McLean; they both have links to Loughborough University – Almond as a student, Daley-Mclean as a player for Lightning; they both worked as teachers; they both played at fly-half; and they both captained England to Women’s Rugby World Cup glory, beating North American opposition in the finals in 1994 and 2014 respectively.
Yet bringing the two women together as we celebrate the milestone anniversaries of those triumphs – next Wednesday, April 24, marks 30 years since Almond lifted the trophy in Edinburgh while on Aug 14 it will be 10 years since Daley-Mclean (then just Mclean) did the same in Paris – also highlights the differences in their careers as well as how much the game has changed and continues to change.
Take their introductions to rugby. Almond’s first love was football and she also did a lot of athletics (Loughborough appealed as a university destination because Sebastian Coe’s coach George Gandy was there). She discovered rugby only when encouraged to give it a go while a student and says: “I was hooked from that first training session. I was like: ‘Woah, you can tackle and run with the ball.’ It was great, I just loved it. And I loved the camaraderie and team spirit.”
In contrast, Daley-Mclean was immersed in the sport from a young age, with her dad, uncle and cousin all playing. She jokes that she “grew up on the side of a rugby pitch” and started playing herself aged five. When she turned 12, though, she could no longer play mixed rugby and did not return to the sport for four years. “At 12 there was nothing – the game just stopped [for girls],” she says. “I played county hockey, then at 16 rugby came back into the picture with a tag tournament. I was probably a bit p----- [off] with the game – ‘You got rid of me at 12’ – but I realised if I was ever going to do anything at a higher level it was going to be rugby.”
Daley-Mclean’s enforced hiatus is indicative of the hurdles women and girls have often faced in sports. Almond and her generation faced a similar challenge when leaving university, on top of inherently sexist attitudes. While there were several student teams in the early Eighties, there was not yet a club structure in the women’s game and they had to find somewhere to play. Almond describes how one of her team-mates, Sue Martineau, wrote to several men’s rugby clubs to convince “these alickadoo men” to introduce a women’s arm – and Wasps agreed. “We basically based our whole careers, jobs, lives around where we could play rugby at that point. And we had to do everything ourselves.”
Paying to play
That “can-do” attitude is evident when it comes to the Women’s World Cup, too. It was the actions of four Richmond players – Alice D Cooper, Sue Dorrington, Mary Forsyth and Deborah Griffiths – that got the inaugural tournament off the ground in 1991, while three years later it was the Scotland team who stepped in when the Netherlands withdrew as hosts, pulling together the World Cup in just 90 days.
England’s players were used to organising their own matches, and also paying for everything involved in that, be it kit, transport or accommodation. “We just lived in our overdraft in those days,” says Almond.
For the 1994 tournament, they upgraded from their usual hostels to the George Hotel in Edinburgh, with Almond saying: “We felt quite important, quite professional, staying in a hotel.”
As for training to prepare for the tournament, they had a few weekend camps in Loughborough and partook in ad-hoc gym programmes they created for themselves. The two weeks of the World Cup itself (yes, England played their five matches across just 14 days) were the longest period they had ever spent together as a squad, though.
Twenty years later, the women’s game was still amateur but the first small steps towards professionalism were being taken. The England squad had regular four-day camps and in June, two months before the World Cup, they came together full-time, with players given “a bit of money to use however you wanted” to take time off work.
Daley-Mclean pooled hers to finish the school year early. Prior to June, she had become used to rising around 5.30am to go to the gym before heading to work to teach and then returning to the gym at the end of the school day for a second session.
As for their accommodation and transport, that was all organised by the Rugby Football Union and International Rugby Board (now World Rugby) come 2014. England decided to base themselves in a hotel on the outskirts of Paris and, in an indication of how far women’s rugby had come in those two decades, they even took their own gym with them, the equipment being driven over and set up in a nearby school.
Final reckoning
Almond’s England were well aware of the challenge that awaited them in the final at Raeburn Place in 1994. After all, they had been beaten by the United States at the same stage of the inaugural tournament three years earlier. That same year, 1991, England’s men bowed to criticism of their forward-dominated style of play heading into their own World Cup final and subsequently lost to Australia; the women’s team would not make that mistake in 1994 and won 38-23.
“We were slated in the press for playing more in the forwards, but we had to do it to win games,” says Almond. “The American backs were amazing. We concentrated on restricting the ball as much as we could to their backs; we had to play to our limitations and to our strengths. Our pack were amazing that day.”
The final whistle brought “complete chaos”, as many of the 6,000 people watching rushed onto the pitch to join in the celebrations. Scotland men’s prop David Sole presented the trophy, with the crowd parting to allow Almond and vice-captain Janis Ross to receive it.
By the time Daley-Mclean took to the stage for a more formal presentation after England’s 21-9 win over Canada 20 years later, she was handed a different piece of silverware as the IRB introduced a new trophy in 1998 when they officially endorsed the women’s tournament.
While the 1994 celebration party was cut short by a fire alarm at the post-match function – “A lot of people were tired and by the time we all came back in, it fizzled out,” recalls Almond – the 2014 one involved drinking a French bar dry and taking the trophy for a dip in the hotel pool. The team bus stopped at the aforementioned bar full of England fans, who had to go to a supermarket to replenish beer stocks, and it was a chance to share their achievement with friends and family as well as those former players who had missed out at previous tournaments (England lost three consecutive World Cup finals before winning 10 years ago). “For me, that World Cup wasn’t about us, it was about the history of the English women’s game and to be able to get rid of that story of being bridesmaids, never brides, so it was pretty cool to be able to share that,” says Daley-Mclean.
Next stop 2025
It is a little over a year until the next World Cup gets under way. Both Almond and Daley-Mclean point to the previous women’s tournament in England in 2010 being huge for the sport. More than 13,000 people filled the Stoop for that final, which England lost 13-10 to New Zealand, and Almond says: “All those people watching women’s sport was amazing. It was a watershed moment for rugby in the UK.” Now the hope is to sell out the 82,000 seats at Twickenham for next year’s showpiece.
It is not just the crowds that are changing, though. More nations are introducing professional women’s programmes in some form, and England lead the way with 32 Red Roses players now contracted by the RFU. The new maternity policy that Abbie Ward and Vickii Cornborough have benefited from is another area Almond brings up, saying: “Maternity leave? How futuristic that would have seemed in 1994.” Daley-Mclean adds: “It was the same in 2014. If you were going to have a family you were going to retire.”
For all the positives, both women also sound warnings about the future. Almond says: “I just hope professionalism doesn’t start to spoil the game, because sometimes I feel girls today are dictated to a reasonable amount about where they can play by who has a contract and who can pay them. Wasps, my club, had to drop out of the top flight last year because of money problems. That was sad because they were one of the teams there from the get-go.”
Daley-Mclean is wary of “outdated attitudes” in some areas of the game and of the likelihood of large winning margins at next year’s expanded 16-team World Cup. “It’s really important the narrative is set from the beginning about what that opportunity is about for those nations, and it’s about getting them that exposure and providing a pathway to 2029 so they can close those gaps. You don’t want to lose new fans because all they’re seeing is big scorelines.” It is worth adding that there were big scores in last year’s men’s World Cup, too.
For all the looking forward, it is important to look back and acknowledge how the likes of Almond have shaped the sport. It is something Daley-Mclean is quick to do having heard about the sacrifices those early generations made as well as the sexism they endured.
“If these guys hadn’t done what they did, I certainly wouldn’t have had the career I had and the girls now definitely wouldn’t be having the opportunities they have,” she says. “It’s wonderful to think about what those guys created. You created our game and people like me will be forever grateful for that.”
