Did news of England’s month-long training session in Bath take you by surprise the way it did me? If you knew, you have spies in all the right places.
We have to thank the University for the revelation, not the TW2 news agency. Sooner or later we will learn who the 26 players were. We can assume that the Sevens ‘moonlighters’ (Mo Hunt, Alex Matthews, Helena Rowland and Meg Jones) were given compassionate leave once they returned from Tokyo, but as for the rest?
The accompanying photos, kindly provided by Bryn Vaile and Matchtight, reveal a fit-looking Amber Reed, which is excellent news both for her personally and England’s outlook.
But we can only guess at the make-up of the squad on hand. At the other end of the experience scale there are the newest candidates for selection, Flo Robinson and Merryn Doidge, who were both denied a first cap by the lights-out in Lille last April.
Simon Middleton coolly summarised the path the players followed – ‘intensity… resilience… physicality… high endurance’ – there are many ways of spending the holiday months.
The Known and the Unknown
But this tendency to secrecy is nothing new; we haven’t been told officially who has been awarded a contract since the last list was published in September 2019. Since then there have been retirements, changes of name and a pandemic; enough to disturb any well-run organisation.
Other things we don’t know include the make-up of the Autumn internationals (an RFU matter) and the programme for the Six Nations (a 6N committee matter). The day will dawn when the women’s schedule for that august championship will be published alongside the men’s, but not just yet.
On the other hand we do know the sequence of matches that will start England’s progress through the World Cup, and it has altered since its first version, slightly to the Red Roses’ detriment.
Over a sequence of tournaments dating back to the last RWC they have been consistently lucky, their opponents neatly increasing in quality and danger. Not so now.
Pool C works out like this:
v Fiji
v France
v South Africa
Originally they were to meet France last. Their progress to the knock-out stages is not in doubt, but a perfectly possible loss to les Bleues – it must come some time in the future – would lower their chances of a favourable draw.
As things stand, the Black Ferns look as certain to win the Big Prize as they were in Tokyo. They have been playing flat out in internal competitions, and those star Sevens players are lining up to take part again. Their attitude to winning takes on an intensity unknown to any other nation.
