Her life as a true great
women’s club games back then might have thought that the standard was poor but it was because it was a group of adult beginners.
You rarely find adult males who start as absolute beginners as they will have played at school. The women were beginners and were learning the game, so I say don’t be critical until you have seen an international match.
I have recounted this next story many times.
It was from the first women’s international match played at Waterloo in 1988 – England v Sweden.
Mike Manning, who was one of the alikadoos, called me over after the game for a chat.
We had beaten Sweden 42-0 I think. He said “Gill I have to be honest with you, I came here today to watch t*ts and bums (he had seen that Sweden were playing and imagined 30 women rolling around in the mud) but after five minutes I realised I was watching a bloody good game of rugger.”
I did not realise how complimentary that comment was at the time. He had been sceptical about the standard of play thinking it was going to be something of a sideshow and in a way he was disappointed as he did watch a good game of rugby.
He recognised that women could play and it was entertaining. He saw some good moves and tries that afternoon.
What we tried to do was to change people’s perceptions.
I have to admit that the first game I saw I was impressed with the speed and commitment I saw on the pitch
It’s exactly the same as the men. The girls are very keen to learn. They are good to coach.
A lot of male coaches when coaching women describe them as sponges because they have not had that history of rugby and they listen and learn.
The women will commit just as much as the men to support their team mates.
The standard now is not as good as it has been. Sadly, I believe the premiership side of 20-25 years ago was the strongest we ever had at the club because of the elite players.
In recent years our better players have moved clubs to enhance their careers.
These days they have a chance to be professional and earn money from the game and I have to say to them “good luck, and go” because you can’t stop someone wanting to progress. It is sad really though that we don’t have a North West team that is attractive enough for players to want to stay in the region.
In many ways you have been a trailblazer for others to follow
People have often said that, but it is not something that we realised we were doing 30 years ago. I just loved rugby, I wanted to do my best, I organised the matches, spoke to people in different areas, set up things informally because no one else did it for us.
We might be now described s trailblazers but back then we just loved the game and wanted to play it, so we organised it.
And you slept on the floor of bars and lounges just to play?
I have slept in some dodgy places during my rugby career. In the early days we stayed in Youth Hostels to keep the cost down.
For the first 10 of my 14 years playing for England we paid for everything ourselves, so dodgy cheap accommodation was a necessity.
The reference to sleeping on the
a floor of a bar was from the last World Cup in 2017 where I went as a paying fan. We decided to camp. It is ridiculous this.
I played international rugby all of those years alongside my career as a school teacher, but all of my money went on rugby as that was my thing. I did not have any savings when I retired from playing as I bought into the game big style.
So even today I have to be careful as I can’t afford to stay in posh hotels like the professionals can, so I needed to camp as did my friends. We were all going to camp in Belfast at one of the rugby clubs which doubled up a camping facility.
Sadly for us the arrangement was cancelled at the last minute so we were without a place to camp. I rang around and all the camp sites were full but another wonderful welcoming club, Malone, said we could go and stay with them.
They said we could camp on their field but we’d have to take your tents down for a touch rugby tournament at the end of the week.
So we said a big thank you and we were relieved we had somewhere to stay.
They would not take any money for us camping, they were so accommodating.
We travelled over to Belfast and were just about to set up our tents when the President, the lovely Patrick Baird, came out and said “Do you know that there is a hurricane coming through on Wednesday?”
We didn’t, but he continued: “Don’t camp here on the field, you can have the upstairs bar and camp in there”.
The room was a bit like Waterloo’s lounge bar and there were eight or nine of us – it was perfect. We all had a section each, it was brilliant.
We knew that at the weekend there was to be a social event in the bar we were camping in so we had to move into a large office, so all nine of us slept in a row in our sleeping bags but it was so funny, great camaraderie. One of the girls from Wasps who was in the 1994 World Cup winning team Giselle, she is now Wasps director of rugby, was just coming out to watch the final and rang me.
“Look, Burnsie I’ve got nowhere to stay, what do you recommend?” I told her if she brought a sleeping bag she could come into the office with us, so we had another one to add into the mix.
She arrived the night before the final, and we all went to bed lying in a row, probably four or five ex-England players, Wales, Australia, a big group of us all having a good laugh.
The lights went out and we could hear the ice running through the rafters, there were lots of shrieks, I said “It’s alright girls I’ve put some money on the Euro Millions tonight.
If I win, tomorrow night we’ll all be staying in a posh hotel in town. Giselle added: “Burnsie, this is brilliant and even if you do win we’re staying here again as we’re having such a good laugh”.
It’s great knowing your old rugby mates who have all been off and enjoyed their lives, careers, families etc but when you get back together it’s like you’ve never been apart.
We can still have a bit of banter with each other, that will never go.
So our camping choice was from necessity as we didn’t have much money to spend on hotels but the camping became the best sort of Glamping I could imagine – right next to the Club Bar!