We’ve come a long way

Flashback to our first World Cup in 2010

When looking back on the decade and a half of women’s rugby that Scrumqueens has covered, perhaps the best way to illustrate how the game has grown and developed is to look at the two England-based World Cups, 2010 and the upcoming tournament this year.

Scrumqueens was largely created to cover the 2010 World Cup, and the site took off because there were hardly any other regular online news sources for women’s rugby at the time.

The most well-established English-language website was YSC.com from the USA (still going, of course), and there were a couple of sites based in France and Spain - but that was essentially it.

In the mainstream media, the game was practically invisible outside of major tournaments though there were some exceptions.

As a little side project, we pulled together all of the major articles about women’s rugby from the mainstream press that we could find up to the 2010 World Cup – it is still around and you can see that here Women's rugby: a newspaper history.

What news appeared and what did not in the printed media was almost random, depending largely on the enthusiasm of small group of reporters. As for TV, the BBC had shown highlights of the 2006 World Cup final, but the idea of even covering the Six Nations was a pipedream.

And then came the 2010 World Cup.

None of the mainstream channels showed any interest in covering the tournament, so Sky TV who stepped in, committing to show half of the pool games, plus the semi-finals and final, with the selection of pool games shown being somewhat influenced by TV channels in New Zealand and Australia.

The competition itself was organised by the RFUW – women’s rugby in England was then not under the RFU – and they put in a huge effort, utilising the newly-built Surrey Sports Park in Guildford, with many teams taking advantage of the university accommodation nearby.

It was by any standards a huge success.

But for all that, the pool stages looked and felt like a club rugby festival.

Two pitches side-by-side, with some temporary stands and a ground capacity of 3,000 per day, largely with walk-up tickets purchased on the day – and soon sold out, much.

The only place where there were plenty of seats was the media area – and that included the final where a lot of seats were reserved for media organisations that did not show up.

We were warned that there might only be room for Scrumqueens to have one seat in the press box on finals day but we could have had an entire row.

To compare that with this year’s tournament - in all likelihood that every individual pool game will have a crowd greater than the total number of people who attended all of the pool games in 2010, every game will be live on the BBC in the UK and also available in any country around the world with an interest in rugby.

And media interest is expected to be orders of magnitude larger.

As for the games themselves, in 2010 the teams were entirely amateur. Indeed some - such as Canada, still operated on “pay to play” – if you were selected,  you had to meet all of your costs. Today the leading teams are at least part-time, if not full-time in some cases, and the players will not be having to pay for their own air fares.

The 2025 World Cup will also see the media provided with copious background data on all of the teams and players, as is now standard in all major events.

To say that this did not exist in 2010 in an understatement.

Some teams produced some basic information about their teams, though the data was so inconsistent and contradictory that Sky turned to… Scrumqueens!

We may have been less than a year old, but our background research had already developed a bit of a reputation, and we were able to provide almost all of the data that broadcasters used in that tournament, for which we received two bottles of wine. And very nice they were too!

We won’t be getting any wine this year, partly because we won’t be there as Scrumqueens, but mainly because we aren’t needed anymore.

In 2010 Scrumqueens were at the centre of things.

We had the best seats and we were first in the queue for player interviews.

In 2025 the world has moved on and is as professional off the field as it is on it.

We are proud to have helped lay a few foundations here and there, but the building that has grown from those foundations is now well beyond a small, amateur, website run by (less than) a handful of people can meaningfully contribute to.

It's been a lot of fun, though and we have loved it.

Thanks for reading.