Nick Heath charts the inexorable growth of England women’s rugby team – from their first fixture in 1987 to hosting the World Cup in 2025
Ellie Kildunne, Marlie Packer, Zoe Aldcroft, Emily Scarratt and Sarah Hunter have each won the World Rugby Women’s 15s Player of the Year award – meaning that the England women’s team has contributed half of the winners of this prestigious trophy over the past decade.
But what of Karen Almond, Carol Isherwood, Deborah Griffin, Sue Dorrington, Alice D Cooper, Mary Forsyth and Giselle Mather? Success comes from strong foundations, and these names – players and administrators alike – are the seeds from which today’s Red Roses have bloomed.
From England’s first international Test match in 1987 to their current run of 20 consecutive victories, this is the story of England women’s rugby: its humble beginnings, its battles for recognition and using the power of dreams to ascend to global dominance.
The early years: pioneering women’s rugby in England
106 matches
Sexism, the 1980s and the first World Cups
The biggest prize and the first professional contracts
Women’s rugby traces its origins back to the 19th century, with records suggesting women played informal matches as early as 1881. However, it was not until the 1960s that the sport took on a more structured form.
The first women’s rugby team was formed in Edinburgh in 1962, and the first recorded game took place in 1968 in Toulouse, France, and throughout the following two decades, interest steadily grew across Europe and the rest of the world.
It was in the Dutch city of Utrecht on Sunday 13 June 1982 that the first women’s international Test match took place, between the Netherlands and France.
The visitors arrived the night before after a 500km bus
The professional era and the birth of the new Red Roses
That 2014 Rugby World Cup win helped Nicky Ponsford, now head of women’s performance at the RFU, to unlock the first professional contracts in the women’s game. These were awarded to 20 players in the sevens programme, as the calendar focus shifted to the shortened form of the game.
Paid contracts would arrive in the XVs game two years later in 2016 alongside a powerful rebranding exercise that led to England Women becoming the Red Roses.
“We wanted the team to not just be a subset of England Rugby, a collective of women who were playing the sport, but we wanted them to be superheroes,” recalls Tom Lister, who was a marketing manager at the RFU at the time. “We wanted them to be an aspirational collective of great athletes that had personality.
Championships played: 23
Growth of grassroots rugby and pathways to success
As the Red Roses flourished, so too did opportunities for young girls to get involved in rugby. The RFU invested in schools and club programmes, aiming to widen participation. The launch of initiatives such as Inner Warrior helped introduce thousands of new players to the game, emphasising the physical and mental benefits of rugby.
The Premier 15s grew from its inception as a rebranded top-flight women’s club league in 2017 to the modern day Premiership Women’s Rugby, which earned its first commercial broadcast deal in 2023.
Moreover, partnerships with universities and development programmes ensured a strong pipeline of talent feeding into the national team. The growth of semi-professional pathways meant that promising players no longer had to choose between rugby and their careers. This expanded infrastructure has helped sustain England’s dominance on the international stage.
The road to the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup
Hosting the Women’s Rugby World Cup is both an honour and a testament to England’s role in shaping the sport’s future.
The tournament, set to take place in August 2025, will mark the first time England has hosted the event since 2010. It will be the largest event, not just with an expanded group of 16 teams but in terms of attendance with record breaking ticket sales.
The RFU set themselves an ambitious target of selling out Allianz Stadium for the final, which all indicators suggest they will achieve. The astute strategic work of today’s leaders such as Alex Teasdale, England Rugby’s Executive Director of Women’s Rugby, has seen the placing of standalone women’s internationals at the home of English Rugby attracting crowds of 50-60,000 in recent years.
Beyond the tournament itself, England’s hosting duties will play a crucial role in growing the sport at the grassroots level. The RFU has committed to increasing participation numbers, ensuring that the next generation of young girls has more access to rugby opportunities than ever before. The hope is that by the time the World Cup arrives, rugby will be more than just a niche sport for women in England – it will be a mainstream powerhouse.
The final attracted a crowd of 13,253 spectators, setting a world record for a women’s rugby international at that time
Legacy and the future of women’s rugby in England
The rise of the Red Roses is emblematic of broader shifts in women’s sport. Increased investment, improved visibility and growing participation at the grassroots level have all contributed to rugby’s surging popularity.
The success of England’s national team has played a crucial role in this transformation, serving as both an inspiration and a blueprint for how to build a successful women’s sporting programme.
As the countdown to the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup begins, one thing is clear: the Red Roses are not just rising; they are redefining the sport.
From that first international match in 1987 to the prospect of lifting the World Cup on home soil, England women’s rugby has come a long way. And this is only the beginning.
Dream big. Win big
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Notable Red Roses through the years
Red Rose No 1
Karen Almond, the first England captain to lift a Rugby World Cup
Red Rose No 73
Sue Day, former COO at the Rugby Football Union
Despite their skill and dedication, the England’s Women’s side – like many women’s sports teams – faced an uphill battle for resources, media attention and support.
It was in 1991 that Deborah Griffin, now at Richmond Rugby Club, considered the idea of staging a women’s international tournament after a club trip to play teams in New Zealand. Having proposed the idea to the WRFU, Griffin began assembling her team to deliver it.
“I did make one stipulation about doing it, which was that I didn’t want to have a committee given to me,” Griffin says. “I wanted to pick the people that were going to help me do this who had the right skill sets.”
Griffin recruited her Richmond club mates: Sue Dorrington had commercial experience; Alice D Cooper worked in advertising and PR; Mary Forsyth was an accountant.
“The fact that we were all friends, and we knew each other so well, meant we hit the ground running. It was all a natural fit,” Forsyth adds.
“When we started faxing the teams, and they started faxing back to say: ‘We’re in,’ we knew it would happen,” Dorrington recalls.
Held in Wales and featuring 12 teams, the tournament was a huge success, although it remained unsupported by the International Rugby Board (now World Rugby) and was not officially recognised as the first women’s Rugby World Cup for 18 years.
England were beaten by a strong USA team in the final but would have their revenge three years later.
The 1994 Women’s Rugby World Cup was meant to be held in Amsterdam but a late cancellation saw Scotland swoop in to rescue the tournament.
England achieved their dreams in the final, clinching a first-ever title by defeating USA 38-23. The side was captained by Almond and featured a young Gill Burns, whose name is now attached to the annual women’s County Championship. In the centre was Giselle Prangnell (now Mather) who is the current head coach of the Great Britain Sevens team. On the flank was Genevieve Shore, who today holds the position of executive chair of Premiership Women’s Rugby.
The victory proved that England could compete – and win – on the biggest stage. Despite this success, investment in women’s rugby remained limited and players continued to juggle work commitments with their rugby careers.
USEAGE NOTE Becuse there are no playing shots of Georgia Brook we are allwoed to have her on her Own.
Jim said Ok to use Sue Day as a cut out
We think we can then cut out Zoe as we had on the print page and Honda is an offical sponsor
Red Rose No 111
Maggie Alphonsi, Rugby World Cup winner and ITV pundit
Red Rose No 262
Georgia Brock, the most recently capped Test player
Red Rose No 213
Zoe Aldcroft, England captain for 2025
Rugby World Cup
Rugby World Cup 2021
Test Match attendance records
The first 10 years, 1987-97
The last 10 years, 2015-25
England Women at the World Cup
Champions x2
1994, 2014
England in the Guinness Women's Six Nations
Runners-up x6 1991, 2002, 2006, 2010, 2017, 2021
Third place x1
1998
Outright wins
14
Grand Slams:
13
Current record: Six-time consecutive winners
Women’s Rugby World Cup attendances 2010-21
Record total attendance of 45,412 over 30 matches, with the final played in front of 17,115 fans
Total attendance of approximately 45,000 spectators
Despite the Covid pandemic, the tournament achieved a record overall attendance of over 140,000 fans, with the final at Eden Park witnessing a historic crowd of 42,579, the largest ever for a women’s rugby match at that time
2010, England
2014, France
2017, Ireland
2021, New Zealand
We wanted them
“We wanted to give them this personality of being outlaws; of being people that were breaking new ground that young aspiring fans could potentially become in the next ten years,” he adds.
Working with a core group of senior players including World Cup winners such as Danielle ‘Nolli’ Waterman and captain Sarah Hunter, Lister was able to call on impassioned marketing colleagues Upneet Thandi and Nicol McClelland who helped create a campaign and launch a video that went stratospheric, gaining over one million views in 24 hours.
McClelland, now director of marketing and communications at Gloucester Rugby, says: “While we knew it was an important step, I don’t think we could have predicted just how meaningful and transformative it would become not just for England, but for women’s rugby in this country. It was a joy to see it go from strength to strength.”
to be superheroes
Tom Lister, former RFU marketing manager
The French team take on the WRFU at Richmond in 1986
A snapshot of the Netherlands v France match in Utrecht in 1982 – the first ever women’s rugby international Test match
The Edinburgh University Amazons, the first recorded women’s rugby team, pictured in 1962
In England, meanwhile, the momentum was building. Deborah Griffin believes that in 1978 she played in the first women’s rugby game in England of the modern era.
The first member of her family to go to university, Griffin attended University College London (UCL). Dating a men’s player gave Griffin a real insight into the culture of the sport, so she decided that the women should have a chance to enjoy this unique game of camaraderie.
She corralled matches by informing fellow universities that UCL had a women’s team and if the opponents didn’t offer their own, UCL would “take the points”. It proved to be an effective strategy.
When Leeds University came to play UCL, there was a meeting of similar minds between Griffin and Leeds’s Carol Isherwood. As their network grew, there was the recognition that this was a movement.
While there continued to be a lack of interest in the women’s game from the Rugby Football Union in England, in 1983 Griffin and other representatives from that university network became the founding members of the Women’s Rugby Football Union (WRFU), which oversaw the development of the sport across England, Wales and Scotland, who had no women’s body of their own. Isherwood was chair.
While the WRFU’s focus in the beginning was firmly on the growth of club rugby, the arrival of touring sides from the United States and France, who had been playing longer and now with greater maturity, inevitably led to the discussion of establishing a Test side.
In 1986, the WRFU invited France to play a Great Britain side in Richmond. Karen Almond was the home side’s standout player, scoring two tries, but the French held on to claim victory 8-14
As expectation grew that Wales and Scotland would align themselves with their own unions, England was able to concentrate on looking after its own fixtures.
England played its first official international match against Wales in 1987. Carol Isherwood was on the flank, with Nicky Ponsford – now head of women’s high performance at World Rugby – at hooker.
The game finished 4-22 to England at Pontypool Park, and history was made. The minutes played by those 17 English women would ignite the power of dreams for the 245 who would go on to wear the jersey after them.
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Carol Isherwood (pictured in white) and her Richmond team-mates pictured in 1990
England Test Matches
We were friends,
”
so we hit the
Mary Forsyth, part of the team that created the first ever women's rugby World Cup
The late 1990s and early 2000s were marked by a gradual increase in awareness of the women’s game, though progress was slow. England continued to challenge for major honours, consistently performing well in the Six Nations Championship (now the Guinness Women’s Six Nations), but a professional structure was still some way off.
In 2010 England hosted the sixth Rugby World Cup and came agonisingly close to the title, losing out in the final to New Zealand. It would prove to be the galvanising moment that would propel this group of women towards achieving their dreams.
Guided by coaches Gary Street and Graham Smith, the team evolved and many of those who had been a part of that 2010 defeat used that heartbreak to power their dreams in the 2014 tournament, held in France, where they were able to lift the trophy.
There was a steely-eyed belief about this England team and having made it through the pool stages, they thrashed Ireland 7-40 in the semi-finals. The Irish had achieved their own moment of glory by unexpectedly beating world champions New Zealand in their previous match.
With media interest and attendances having swelled throughout the two week-long tournament, England faced Canada in the final and defeated them 21-9 to jubilant scenes at the sold-out Stade Jean Bouin in Paris.
The turning point was on the horizon.
ground running
The 1994 World Cup final in Edinburgh where England beat USA to claim their first world title
94 wins
30 matches
29 wins
42,579
Eden Park
New Zealand
Double-header finals day
Spectator attendance records
Rugby World Cup 2017
17,115
Kingspan Stadium
Belfast
Triple-header finals day
England v France 2023
58,498
Allianz Stadium
Wales v Italy 2024
10,592
Principality Stadium
Cardiff
France v England 2024
c28,000
Stade Chaban-Delmas
Bordeaux
England in action against New Zealand in 2010 (above left) and against Canada in 2014 (above right). Head coach Gary Street (blue jacket, left) congratulates his team after a Six Nations match against Wales in 2014
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Deborah Griffin
Nicky Ponsford, now head of women’s performance at the RFU
England in action against New Zealand in 2010 (above left) and against Canada in 2014 (above right). Head coach Gary Street (blue jacket, left) congratulates his team after a Six Nations match against Wales in 2014
30 matches
29 wins
journey but that would not deny them a 0-4 win thanks to a try by winger Isabelle Decamps.
In England, meanwhile, the momentum was building. Deborah Griffin believes that in 1978 she played in the first women’s rugby game in England of the modern era.
The first member of her family to go to university, Griffin attended University College London (UCL). Dating a men’s player gave Griffin a real insight into the culture of the sport, so she decided that the women should have a chance to enjoy this unique game of camaraderie.
She corralled matches by informing fellow universities that UCL had a women’s team and if the opponents didn’t offer their own, UCL would “take the points”. It proved to be an effective strategy.
When Leeds University came to play UCL, there was a meeting of similar minds between Griffin and Leeds’s Carol Isherwood. As their network grew, there was the recognition that this was a movement.