Fainting Goats on Tour
Southend Rugby Club’s first women’s team
After a week in Portugal, it’s time to focus on the W6N. England head to Wales to play at the Principality Stadium for the first time. Although I’m reporting on the match remotely for talkSPORT this afternoon, matches in Cardiff always spark special rugby memories because my first experience of being on tour was with my team.
I played for Southend Women back in the day, having been dragged kicking and screaming to train when the first side came into being. My very talented older sister Shelagh had discovered rugby at Lancaster University and wanted to keep playing when she graduated. I was co-opted to go with her to the rugby club so "we" could join. It seemed a bad idea to me, to give up Sunday lie-ins, leisurely lunches for a rattling ride in a grubby minibus to join what looked like violent mud-baths, surely that wasn’t going to be any fun at all but as is occasionally true I was wrong, Shelagh was right.
Having taken my kicking and screaming onto the pitch only to realise rugby was just the sport for me, I set about learning the finer points of being in a rugby team, (reworked words to the dirty songs, avoiding drinking fines, getting into the ladies for a pre-match wee before key players let go with nervous poos) and also in 1991 that meant jumping into the aforementioned grubby mini-bus and heading for a bunch of caravans on Barry Island to support the unsanctioned, renegade and superb Women's World Cup.
It only took place thanks to the dogged persistence and ridiculous optimism of some inspiring women who took massive risks to make it happen, some literally putting their homes up as collateral. They believed in it and us grassroots rugby fans were able to back them up after they insisted on making it happen. I urge you to read more about the hoohah surrounding the event, there's this on the World Ruby museum website, and, of course, Wikipedia. The IRB has a lot to thank these players for.
There was no internet, no mobile phones, no social media and very little space in the rugby press let alone the sports pages for information about the women's game so it's a mystery to me how we even knew what was planned. I do remember laughing hard every day of the tour and being told about fainting goats as it led to a Tour Rule being imposed; Every Player Must Become a Fainting Goat When Hearing the Word Chocolate - or else face the forfeit - it had quite the effect in larger crowds. We played bingo with the locals of Barry Island and our front row scrummed down in the caravan park bar with cauliflower-eared veterans of the game, who wouldn't believe we played rugby. We converted them, doing our bit for the women's game.
But it was being in the shadowy stands of Cardiff Arms Park, a place I'd only ever seen on the telly that was truly exciting. I remember feeling a wave of emotion and a strange feeling of pride watching the players head out onto the pitch and there was a surge of love and support from the men and women filling the stands - you only get that in sport, there must be better words to express that collective appreciation for an event about to be shared. Somewhere in my rugby bag is the t-shirt and match programme from the Tour, with the only USSR team to have ever played at a Rugby World Cup who were stopped at customs from trying to fund their trip with bottles of vodka and tins of caviar: where the "Gal Blacks" as the New Zealanders were known performed the first women's rugby haka, and where the Welsh welcomed the women's game to a sacred space in rugby.
When the teams take to the pitch at the Principality Stadium in Cardiff today, there's going to be a record attendance for a women's sporting event held in Wales . More than 18,000 tickets have been sold, so as it was in 1991 there will be empty seats but they are getting fewer, as Womens Rugby metaphorically and literally speaking drives another few metres foward. It's another chapter in the sport and the emotion will be added to the vestigia embedded in the grounds and the soil, left by the fans and players at the Arms Park more than 30 years earlier