Two stories from the week in women’s rugby.
On Wednesday, it emerged that there is to be a women’s Lions tour to New Zealand in 2027. Since everybody already knew that Andy Farrell was going to be the men’s coach for next year’s trip to Australia, a judicious leak about the women’s tour three years from now caught the eye as the one bit of newsy news out of the whole thing. It’s set to be confirmed officially next Tuesday.
Meanwhile, on the home front, two of today’s fixtures in the women’s AIL Cup have been cancelled and given up as 28-0 walkovers. Both Old Belvedere and Blackrock College have lost so many players to the combined Leinster/Ulster Wolfhounds team playing in the new Celtic Challenge competition that they have decided they can’t field viable XVs in the domestic cup.
On the face of it, there’s very little to link the two stories. One is a bells and whistles job, a presumed commercial bonanza at the elite end of the game. The other is a bad-news-is-no-news shrug of the shoulders about a forlorn cup competition at amateur level.
One was the back-page splash in the Times of London and got the full paint-factory-explosion treatment on Sky Sports News. The other didn’t register anywhere outside of a couple of select Twitter/X accounts. Worlds apart. Universes apart.
And yet, they’re not really. When it comes right down to it, the distance between the AIL Cup and a prospective women’s Lions tour isn’t that far at all. You’re only talking about a few degrees of separation altogether.
Between them, Old Belvedere and Blackrock contributed 15 players who got playing time in the Wolfhounds’ win over Edinburgh last weekend. When the Ireland squad for the Six Nations is announced in the coming weeks, most of them will be in contention. The next step, nominally at least, would be the Lions.
In the men’s game, it would obviously be nonsense to be talking about a domestic club cup competition and the Lions in the same breath. But the playing pool in the women’s game, certainly in Ireland at any rate, is still desperately shallow. So much so that two of the more high-profile teams – they lie third and fourth in the AIL league at present – can’t absorb that sort of hit and still credibly fulfil a cup fixture.
All of which gives any talk of a women’s Lions tour a surreal, detached feeling. Ireland are obviously a part of the deal and those players have, technically, as much of a chance of making the plane in 2027 as anyone else in the four nations.
But, in real terms, everyone knows that a women’s Lions tour of New Zealand will essentially be an England tour of New Zealand with a few extra players from Scotland, Wales and Ireland brought along to take the bad look off it.
Which is not to say that it won’t be a success, of course.
By 2027, the World Cup in England will have taken place and the home side will either have avenged its shock defeat in the 2022 final in Eden Park or New Zealand will have completed their three-in-a-row.
Other outcomes are possible – France will presumably have something to say – but you have to go back to the first World Cup in 1991 for the only time either England or New Zealand weren’t world champions so it’s hardly an outrageous prediction that one or other of them will prevail in 2025.
So you can see quite clearly why the women’s Lions would go to play New Zealand in 2027. It serves as a handy place-filler in the down years between World Cups, it works for Sky (who had a person on the steering committee), it works for sponsors (ditto). It’s big and bold and eye-catching and, crucially, it demands virtually no thinking whatsoever on the part of the casual sporting public in England. Lions v New Zealand? Sure! Stick it on there and we’ll give it a whirl.
(They won’t be able to call the team the Lionesses, of course. The English FA trademarked the term back in 2015 and attached it to their women’s soccer team, a move that has paid off spectacularly in the intervening nine years. The rare case of rugby’s silk class being beaten to the punch.)
But even if the whole thing turns out to be a roaring triumph – and it will no doubt be pronounced as such when it happens – even that triumph will be confined mainly to the two strongest nations in the women’s game.
Like the men’s tours, it will enrich sponsors and television companies first and foremost. It will make the sport even more top-heavy than it already is.
Most depressingly of all, it will do nothing for the development of women’s rugby anywhere else. The ocean that exists between England and the other Lions nations is vast – Ireland’s 0-48 defeat to them in last year’s Six Nations was the closest any of the three teams have got to them in the past two iterations of the competition.
There is so much ground to make up, not just here but in countries like Spain, Canada and the US where the women’s game has existing constituencies that could be built on. The shiny trinket of a Lions tour to New Zealand won’t make a dent in that distance. It will widen it, if anything.
The sport is so young. We forget this all the time. In all the countries where it has any sort of foothold, it needs its player base to be widened and deepened. That requires all the old boring stuff – coaching, systems, schools, pathways, finance, volunteers, media. It requires it yesterday. Actually, it requires it 20 years ago but we are where we are.
But most of all, it requires acceptance that women’s rugby it is own thing. It’s not men’s rugby with added ponytails. It has its own norms and cultures and challenges.
Like every successful sport since the dawn of time, the only bits of it that will endure are the bits that grow organically. Bolting the Lions onto women’s rugby isn’t organic. It’s taking something that makes money in the men’s game and rolling the dice to see if it will make money in the women’s one.
That’s no way to build a sustainable future. Instead, and with a familiar lack of imagination, it’s an exercise in layering the structures and traditions of male sport onto female sport and calling it progress.
Nothing new there.
