Two months ago, the Red Roses, England women’s rugby union team, quietly walked out at the Allianz Stadium in Twickenham. It was their home World Cup squad announcement day and John Mitchell’s team stepped out in public for the first time in their all-white Castore kits before a group photo on the pitch. A few cheers echoed across from staff watching from the other side of the ground on a day the largely empty stadium had been double-booked. One corner was being used as a photo opportunity for s
It was their home World Cup squad announcement day and John Mitchell’s team stepped out in public for the first time in their all-white Castore kits before a group photo on the pitch. A few cheers echoed across from staff watching from the other side of the ground on a day the largely empty stadium had been double-booked.
One corner was being used as a photo opportunity for students who had graduated from the University of West London. But barely anyone from the graduation party looked over.
On Saturday, England’s welcome into the same stadium for their 33-13 World Cup final win against Canada was a lot more lively and emotional. They were roared through the Rowland Hill Memorial Gates by thousands of fans wearing cowboy hats and giant roses on their heads and taking up every vantage point possible to get a glimpse of the soon-to-be crowned world champions.
England were being cheered on towards the entrance and the trophy – which they lifted for a third time following victories in 1994 and 2014 – but also towards a future where women’s rugby union is on the map and in a place from where there is no going back.
This team have won every game since losing the World Cup final 34-31 to hosts New Zealand in November 2022. They had won 30 games going into that final in Auckland and came into this tournament as the top-ranked side and heavy favourites to win.
And that is exactly what they did — starting at Sunderland’s Stadium of Light in the north-east of England last month in front of 42,723 fans against the United States, the inaugural World Cup winners in 1991, who they beat 69-7.
For their final victory, the crowd almost doubled in size from that opening Pool A win. A total of 81,885 gathered, the most ever for a women’s rugby match.
The whole tournament has been a major success. More than 440,000 spectators attended games across England, millions watched on television and so many more connected with the personality-led content shared to social media by athletes from across the 16 teams.
England, who lifted the Six Nations title for a seventh consecutive year in April, have now won 61 of their past 62 matches — marking them as arguably the greatest women’s international rugby union team of all-time. Captain Zoe Aldcroft said it does feel as if they are the best ever after this latest and historic win. In her Scarborough accent, with the golden trophy perched in front of her, she called it a “cherry on top of the cake” moment.
It is no coincidence England have only lost two games since the start of 2019, when the Rugby Football Union, the sport’s governing body in England, introduced full-time contracts for national team players. No international women’s rugby union team can match what England are doing on the pitch or off it. The country is also home to Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR), a nine-team semi-professional league which is the most competitive domestic league in the world.
Runners-up Canada, who are the second-best ranked team and selected 16 PWR players for their 32-player World Cup squad, have not enjoyed the same resources as England. Nobody has.
On top of the funding they received from Canada Rugby, the country’s governing body, and World Rugby, the sport’s global governing body, the team set up a fundraiser to help them make it to what was only their second World Cup final, having lost to England at that stage of the 2014 tournament. Named ‘Mission: Win Rugby World Cup’, a million Canadian dollars (£535,000; $717,000 at current exchange rates) was donated to help the team follow a “world-class plan for training and competition”.
Sophie de Goede, named World Rugby player of the year after this game, gave Canada something to celebrate on the pitch. When she returned to her team-mates, she disappeared into a sea of red and only emerged when she was repeatedly thrown up into the air with her personal trophy. After the game, she called for more financial backing into their women’s team so that over the next four years they can build towards avenging this defeat in Australia in 2029.
Asked whether there is a danger England could pull further in front if other nations do not back their women’s teams in the same way, De Goede said: “The RFU does a really good job of supporting their women’s programme. They’re leading in this space and if we look at the rugby game today, England fully deserved the win regardless of how much investment (they have).
“We could have won that game today and we just didn’t put it out on the field. That’s the big takeaway for me: how can we improve on the field? But on the Canadian side, more investment will only help us.”
Mitchell, who has been England coach since late 2023, said he owes a lot to the pathway which has been created by the PWR, where all 32 of his World Cup winners played last season. He said the win would not be possible without that infrastructure and he hopes it will give him even more of a selection headache moving forward, with even more girls taking up the sport after being inspired by yesterday’s scenes in south-west London.
“We can dominate the world for a long time but the world is going to get better because people are starting to recognise how to resource their programmes,” the New Zealander, who previously worked as a defence coach for England’s men, said. “This is just the start. What an unbelievable atmosphere and if this is the start, look at what the future is going to look like.”
Ellie Kildunne, one of the team’s most popular players, turned up in the mixed zone wearing a rhinestone-encrusted cowboy hat with her name on and had a pink can of alcohol taken away by a press officer.
Kildunne, who plays at fullback and is known for her speedy, slaloming runs through the pitch, settled England’s nerves after scoring one of her trademark tries in the eighth minute to cancel out Asia Hogan-Rochester’s fifth-minute opener for Canada. After Zoe Harrison converted the subsequent kick, England led 7-5 and, despite pressure from Canada, who had the country’s Prime Minister Mark Carney watching on, England did not look back, scoring five times in total.
“I remember at the last World Cup thinking ‘If we win, this is going to be a thing that changes the sport’,” Kildunne said. “Before this game today we’d already changed the sport and I think that was the biggest difference.”
Kildunne said now that the team have sold out Twickenham, the challenge will be to keep on doing that and to “keep on getting better, bigger and louder”.
There are similarities to how England’s women’s football team took the nation by storm in 2022 when they won their home European Championship in front of a record crowd at Wembley Stadium after a similarly successful home tournament.
That moment put women’s football on an upward trajectory. Since then, attendances in the Women’s Super League, the country’s top domestic league, have increased. More girls than ever before have taken up the sport and those players under coach Sarina Wiegman went on to reach a World Cup final in 2023. Earlier this year, they retained their European title by winning Euro 2025 on penalties against Spain in Switzerland.
The atmosphere in Twickenham felt very similar to that at Wembley, where the Lionesses have continued to draw huge crowds after their success in 2022. Arsenal forward Chloe Kelly, who scored the winning goal in both Euros finals, was at Twickenham to support the Red Roses. As was Chelsea and England defender Lucy Bronze, who since her debut in 2013 has featured for England 140 times and watched fans at games grow from hundreds to thousands.
“I’ve always said that I want the impact of this World Cup to exceed my imagination,” Kildunne added, as her team-mate Hannah Botterman snuck behind try-scorer Amy Cokane to pour a drink over her.
“You can use the Lionesses as a standpoint. What they’ve done for women’s football and football in general has been absolutely huge but we’re rugby, we’re a different sport. We’re women in sport and we want to inspire as many people as we can do, just like the Lionesses.
“But we’re here to write our own story. We want to get everyone else involved in it and we’re closely linked with the footballers, they were all messaging saying “good luck”. Women supporting women is the most important thing, but I want to keep on pushing the boundary and keep exceeding expectations.”
Scrum-half Natasha Hunt and back-row forward Alex Matthews were the only players in Saturday’s matchday squad who played in the victory against Canada in the Paris final 11 years ago.
Hunt, eager to talk all about the win on Saturday, was the first player into the mixed zone but joked journalists would only be getting two minutes of her time. They got a lot more than that.
In her bare feet and with tears falling, her team-mate Matthews said this was “the icing on the cake”. Now a two-time world champion, having lost the previous two finals in 2017 and 2022, it was Matthews who put the icing on the win herself by scoring her second try of the match 11 minutes from time to help England to a 20-point cushion as the clock ticked down.
Videos of Abby Dow gifting her opposition No 14 a crocheted keyring before or after matches have been going viral online throughout the tournament. Dow, 27, wearing a crocheted rose in her hair, was in disbelief at not just the crowd but the feeling when the final whistle went, having been on the end of that agonisingly close defeat to New Zealand three years ago.
“We’ve got a ball rolling and I don’t want it to stop,” she said. “What’s so important is the influence that we will have towards grassroots right now and that actually rugby has influence to just change anyone’s life.
“I want it flourish across the country, because look at what football’s done in the women’s game. Look how it’s got so many girls questioning ‘Why am I not allowed to play? Why am I not doing that? Why are the boys there getting their knees muddy?’ What we’re trying to prove is that it’s not just a one-off with football, it’s women’s sport as a whole — and it’s here to stay.”
The team’s vice captain Megan Jones, who was born in Cardiff and made her debut for England in 2015, had already booked in for celebratory tattoos with Botterman on Sunday, following a trophy celebration with fans which will take place at Battersea Power Station today, two months on from when thousands gathered to welcome home the Lionesses outside Buckingham Palace.
The day before the final, Jones took her mind off things by having a cup of tea and a hot air balloon etched into her left arm.
“Mitch allows us and gives us that freedom to be who we are and express who we are,” she said. “We’re leading with compassion, we’re leading with vulnerability, we are leading with love. And that’s what humans want at the end of the day. As soon as we do that and we keep doing that, it’s going to keep momentum going.”
When Aldcroft took hold of the trophy and headed towards her team-mates on the temporary stage which had the word “Champions” in giant lettering above them, it was metres from where they had stood together in their stainless kits just 65 days ago with nobody watching.
During the tournament, the mobile phone network and the team’s main shirt sponsor O2 plastered posters of the team’s members up and down the country with the tagline “England, meet England”. Now they have.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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