Why her 100th cap is down Daley-mclean’s list of priorities
England history-maker tells Kate Rowan the return of full-time contracts matters most ‘We are not living on edge. The most pleasing thing is that contracts are now here to stay’
Tomorrow night, Katy Daley-mclean will make her own piece of history. When she runs out at Allianz Park for the Red Roses’ opening Quilter International against the United States, accompanied by her niece and mascot for the night, Sienna, she will become just the sixth player, female or male, to reach the 100-cap mark for England.
It is a remarkable achievement, the latest staging post in a career which has included Daley-mclean captaining her country to victory in the 2014 World Cup, going to the 2016 Rio Olympics in sevens and establishing herself as the finest female kicking player in the world.
Yet it says everything about Daley-mclean’s selflessness that the prospect of becoming a Test centurion is not the milestone dominating her thoughts.
Instead, she prefers to focus on another historic moment, the decision by the Rugby Football Union to restore full-time contracts to England’s women XVS players from Jan 1.
“If you look at where rugby was at when I first got capped in 2007 and you asked me where rugby would be at 11 years later, and that we would talking about full-time contracts, I wouldn’t have believed it,” she says, with something close to wonder in her voice.
Not that this moment has come easily. It has been a long, and at times acrimonious, battle, one that dates back to July 2017, when it was confirmed – just weeks before the World Cup – that they would not be having their deals renewed.
The decision attracted a welter of criticism, from MPS to former players, and left the squad having to balance their rugby commitments around part-time employment to supplement their match and training fees.
Daley-mclean had given up her job as a primary schoolteacher when handed a full-time contract, so the decision to take it away was devastating.
No wonder, then, that the chance of earning another deal in 2019 is a source of such relief. “I’ve been very lucky in my career to see the contracts come in and then to see them go again,” she says. “Now, that they are back, the most pleasing thing for me is that these contracts are here to stay, we are not going to be living on edge wondering whether we will get a contract for six, eight months now.
“I didn’t want to commit to going back to school because there was talk of these contracts coming back in. I was waiting a bit to see what would happen. For me, it is massive – it means I can work really hard at my rugby but I’ve got the financial support to make sure I’ve got enough rest.
“I will be getting everything I need rather than thinking I need to earn a little bit of money this month to balance the training or not being able to commit to something because I have to get full-time work.
“We know that the RFU have worked hard to make sure they can deliver this for the long term. For me and a lot of our girls, we were juggling full-time jobs with full-time rugby – we were
doing that in the build-up to the 2014 World Cup. The challenge for the girls now is to make sure they think about their career postrugby.”
Daley-mclean would never say it herself, but it is down to contributions like hers that the case for full-time XVS contracts became unanswerable.
The 32-year-old is part of a golden generation of players, also including Danielle Waterman, England’s leading all-time appearance-maker Rocky Clark, Sarah Hunter and Tamara Taylor, who have taken women’s rugby to a new audience, thanks in no small part to their heroics in France in 2014.
Waterman and Clark have retired now, with six new faces in Simon Middleton’s squad for the game against the US, but Daleymclean is not going anywhere yet.
“We want to build a brand in women’s rugby and the amount of publicity the contracts issue got shows people are interested in our sport,” she adds. “It means we must be doing something right.”