Women’s Rugby World Cup

This month sees the start of the delayed Women’s Rugby World Cup 2021 in New Zealand between 8th October -12th November.

The World Rankings for the Nations taking part have recently been released and England tops the table with Ireland 8th, Wales 9th and Scotland at 10th. England remain unbeaten winning 25 tests in a row so are seen as favourites going into the competition.

Wales and Scotland have been drawn together in Pool A with Australia and New Zealand!

Pool B is Canada, Japan, USA and Italy.

England is in Pool C with France, South Africa and Fiji.

The competition starts on 8th October with a star line up to entertain the fans. However, as the matches take place in New Zealand, they will be shown live in the very early mornings, U.K time. However, the good news is that as ITV will be showing all the games then you can press record or watch on catch up.

Match Officials

One of the match officials at the tournament, and the person with the nerve wracking job of refereeing the first game of the tournament, will be Maggie Cogger-Orr of New Zealand. Having stopped playing rugby following injury, she concentrated on refereeing which she found she loved. In 2021, she was named among 24 male and female match officials in New Zealand’s high-performance referee squad and this will be her first Rugby World Cup.

There are 18 match officials from 11 unions officiating at the RWC.

In a recent interview with World Rugby Maggie was asked:

What’s your favourite law in rugby and why?

I think my favourite law is Law 9.27: “A player must not do anything that is against the spirit of good sportsmanship”. This to me absolutely defines why rugby is the greatest sport in the world – because even though it is a physical battle where no one wants to give an inch, there is this binding understanding that the ‘spirit’ of the game still has to come first!