It was quiet at Sunderland station on Friday afternoon, and quiet all the way up Union and South Streets and quiet all the way along to Keel Square, where the World Cup was hidden, waiting around the corner like a surprise party. There three, four, five thousand or more were bouncing up and down while a stout lad with Spandex trousers, a sequined jacket and serious pipes was belting out the opening notes of We Will Rock You on the big stage while his band thrashed away behind him. If everywhere else around town was empty, it was because everyone was here. It was a hell of a way to start a World Cup.
“Let’s show them how we do it in the north-east!” shouted out the Mackem Mercury as he set a carnival parade off marching over the bridge towards the Stadium of Light for the kick-off.
Sunderland was a great place for the opening game. The tournament has been organised so that 95% of the population is within two hours’ travel of a match. Usually you have to go a long way further than that to find a good game in the north-east.
There isn’t an elite women’s rugby club in this corner of the country. The North East Women’s XV was launched in 2024, but have struggled to attract enough sponsorship to cover kit costs, let alone pay for coaches. There’s no shortage of talent, there are more than 100 girls on the RFU pathway just in Durham, never mind the surrounding counties, but they have nowhere to go except down south if they want to carry on in it.
The World Cup is part of an effort to put that right. The RFU has pledged to invest plenty of the Impact 25 money it has had from the government in this region over the next decade, and the North East Combined Authority had pumped £500,000 into the fan zone alone. It showed, too. Newcastle Rugby Foundation was running a series of busy skills workshops for all the kids there, with radar guns measuring whether they could sprint as quick as Ellie Kildunne, or pass as fast as Mo Hunt.
Life moves fast, but hell, the Women’s World Cup has grown up quicker than the teenage nephew you haven’t seen for three years. The last time this tournament was held in this country, in 2010, the opening game was played at Surrey Sports Park in Guildford, in front of a crowd of just under 3,000 people who were packed into temporary grandstands.
Fifteen years later, more people than that had turned out just to watch the Queen tribute band playing in the fan zone over the road from the ground a couple of hours before the match.
The crowd for this opening game was bigger than the combined attendance for the entire tournament in 2010, and, from watching it, you would bet World Rugby spent more on the fireworks that were let loose from the stadium roof in the minutes before kick-off than it did staging that entire edition of the competition.
No wonder Marlie Packer and Emily Scarratt and a couple of England’s other older players made a point of taking a moment for a slow walk around the ground before the team warm-up, just to soak in the moment. The game has come a long way even since they first played.
No one who has been in the sport for any length of time seems quite able to believe it, even World Rugby’s higher-ups seem to be a bit bewildered by just how popular the women’s game has become all of a sudden.
The question hanging over the team is exactly how they will cope with the occasion given that they have never really had to deal with this much attention and expectation. Well, nothing in rugby serves to settle the nerves like a good maul, and the Red Roses rolled out a couple at the first good chance they had. Sadia Kabeya scored off the second, and their World Cup was off and running.
England settled the game in a 10-minute stretch late in the first half, when the USA were down to 14 players because Alev Kelter had been sent to the sin-bin. England put 14 points on them in that period, one try from another maul, the other after a neat bit of interplay from Abby Dow and Kildunne down the right wing after the USA made a dreadful mess of a restart. That put England 21 points up, and from there it was downhill running all the way to the whistle.
It was late by the time they scored their ninth and 10th tries, and some of the thousands of little kids in the crowd were beginning to drift away to sleep, their nodding heads snapped back off their parents’ shoulders by the screams and shouts and intermittent blasts of the White Stripes or Depeche Mode coming over the stadium PA as England scored another. They had hours to sleep ahead of them in the car ride home, and then in their beds, and sweet dreams of Kabeya, Kildunne, Dow and all their other new heroes.
