Women’s game alive and kicking

RUGBY: Sheila Begbie is happy with the progress of her overhaul but knows there is still much to do, hears Stuart Bathgate

TWO years on from her appointment as head of women’s rugby at Murrayfield, Sheila Begbie is confident that progress is being made across the board. At the highest level, Jade Konkel has become Scottish Rugby’s first female professional player. At the grassroots, there are a dozen new teams in the national leagues, 160 new players since the summer, and a small league in the north of the country, run with financial assistance from Murrayfield. And, somewhere in between, there is a growing number of young academy players who, over the next few years, will be vying to join Konkel in the full-time ranks.

Admittedly, such progress has come from a low level. The national team, winners of the Grand Slam in 1998, have been also-rans of late in the Six Nations Championship – partly because other countries became more professional in their outlook earlier, but also because of the small player numbers in Scotland.

So Begbie, who previously held the equivalent post at the Scottish Football Association, decided that the game as a whole needed an overhaul. The recruitment of Konkel was preceded last summer by the appointment of Shade Munro as Scotland’s head coach and, thanks to the national academies, there is now a clear route for promising young players to take from their initial years in the sport to membership of Munro’s squad.

It will be several more years before such changes have a full impact, but the initial signs are promising. And if the national team can emulate the feat just achieved by their footballing counterparts and qualify for the finals of a major tournament, that will surely help accelerate the progress.

“We’ve got two play-off games for next year’s Rugby World Cup coming up in November, and if we qualified it would have a major impact on all different levels of the women’s game through increased participation,” says Begbie. “We saw that through the Olympic Games this summer – we got 160 new women into rugby through what they’d seen on TV.

“We’ll probably be playing Spain, Russia or the Netherlands, and Spain are the highest ranked. It’s a home-and-away play-off, and if it’s Spain, our first game will be at home. If it’s Russia or Holland, we’ll be away first. It’s going to be a huge challenge for the team and for Shade, but we’re certainly going to give it our best shot.

“Although we didn’t win a game in the Six Nations last season, we definitely saw an improvement in the performance of the team, and we’ll look to build on that. Our academy programme, aligned with Shade coming in, has had a major impact on individual players.”

While Broadwood was the venue for Scotland’s full internationals last season, Scotstoun could come into consideration for the play-offs. Based on the world rankings, Spain are favourites both to qualify for the play-off against Scotland and then to win it, although they did lose at home to Munro’s team last November. If Scotland do get through to the finals in Ireland, Begbie hopes there will be greater media interest than there has been hitherto, and that such interest will in turn help attract more players to the sport. “If our women’s team qualify for next year’s World Cup, we’ll have a women’s team from each of the two major sports at a finals tournament following the football side’s qualification for next year’s European Championships. And I would be absolutely disappointed if there was no interest from the BBC in televising some of the games. “Margot McCuaig from Purple TV and BBC Alba has done a fantastic job with women’s football to get the World Cup and European Championship qualifying games on TV. But the England team’s qualifier against Estonia was actually on BBC2 recently, so there’s a real disparity between what’s happening down south and in Scotland. So while BBC Alba are doing a fantastic job, the BBC still have to have a good look at themselves and put a match on BBC1 or BBC2.

“I know that when Shona Robison was Minister for Sport, she did a lot of work around the BBC in terms of trying to get a more equal share of women’s sport on TV. We have to put more pressure on the likes of the BBC to maybe try to make women’s sport a bit more attractive.

“It’s incumbent on us as well to try to raise the quality of the game so the media actually take stock and decide that they should be following women’s rugby more.”

While Begbie’s primary concern may be more television exposure, it would be fair to say that other branches of the media could also do a lot more to help publicise women’s sport. Next week is Women’s Sport Week 2016, and one of the aims of the campaign, now in its second year, is to ensure greater visibility for women and girls in every aspect of the industry.

“Women’s sport is going through a renaissance in terms of having a much higher profile,” Begbie accepts. “But we keep saying, ‘You can’t be what you can’t see’, so the reality for us is the more that girls see women’s sport on TV and in the media, the more they see the likes of Clare Balding and Hazel Irvine on TV, the more they say ‘Well, I can be that person. I can do that as well’.”