The World Cup set up in 90 days via fax machine and beer
Unlikely story of how rebel tournament was put on by a group of players in a Leith pub is about to hit the stage
It is 30 years since England won the Women’s Rugby World Cup in Scotland – a rebel event that can lay claim to have been one of the most unlikely tournaments in sporting history.
In the face of powerful opposition from rugby union’s dinosaur overseers, it was cobbled together from a cupboard at Meadowbank Stadium, via fax machine, by a group of defiant Scotland players, outraged that their dream of appearing in a World Cup was being taken away from them. They decided, in a Leith pub, that the 1994 tournament was going to happen despite a seemingly impossible deadline.
If this sounds like something from the pen of a scriptwriter, that is because it is. The story is about to be told on stage in a musical, 90 Days, at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, which commemorates the anniversary of a tournament that should never have been.
Sue Brodie sips her coffee in the Raeburn Hotel in Edinburgh. Out of the window, on a grey day in the Scottish capital, is the Edinburgh Academicals rugby ground where 6,000 people squeezed in to watch the 1994 final – the proud culmination of a game-changing fortnight.
Brodie was the driving force behind it all. She shakes her head, reminiscing. “It was incredibly naive. There were 400 players coming from all over the world. There were a lot of things that could have gone wrong,” she says.
Beside her sits Sandra Colamartino, her Scotland team-mate, who explains why they pressed ahead anyway. “It was the only way of maintaining the progress of women’s rugby,” she says. “If we’d have lost the momentum then, we could have been a decade behind where we are now.”
On Saturday, Scotland played France at Hive Stadium in Edinburgh in the Women’s Six Nations, in front of a record crowd for a Scotland women’s international of 5,600. But the sport was not so established 30 years ago.
In 1991, the first Women’s World Cup had taken place in Wales. On the back of this, the Netherlands stepped forward to stage the 1994 event. The Scots, who had played their first international the previous year against Ireland at Raeburn Place, were one of the 16 nations to sign up. However, just three months before the event, the International Rugby Board told the Dutch that they did not have permission to stage any such tournament. So, the World Cup was off, no matter that hundreds of dreams were being shattered.
“It wasn’t the right time for the IRB,” Colamartino says. “They were being rushed into a conversation about women’s rugby that they didn’t want to be part of at the time. They actively sought to shut us down and put us in our place.”
Except that Brodie was not having it. She is quietly spoken and calm, more of an organiser than a rabble-rouser, but still waters run deep. “When the fax came through, I was so disappointed,” Brodie says. “The combination of that emotion and the sense of ‘this just cannot happen’ spurred me on to do something.”
She called a team meeting in the Todd’s Tap pub and outlined a plan so foolhardy it made perfect sense – after a few drinks anyway. Scotland’s women would host the tournament – with no professional staff, no idea what they were doing and only 90 days to do it in.
“The more beer we drank, the more convinced we were that it was the best idea we’d ever heard, because it meant that our dream was alive again,” Colamartino says.
“One of the players was a nurse, so Sue said to her, ‘Well, you can organise all the ambulances’. I was a graphic designer at Heriot-watt University, so I was able to stay late and make the programme on the sly. My partner at the time worked in a bank. So, he was the treasurer. It was all divvied up in that manner, combining our skill-sets and pooling our resources.”
Mission control – or broom cupboard central – for the “World Championship”, as they chose to call it to wrong-foot the IRB, was Meadowbank Sports Centre, where Brodie was acting manager.
From a tiny room, grounds, referees, accommodation, accreditation, media access and everything else associated with a global tournament was pulled together in spare moments. “Landlines, languages, time zones, fax machines… it was very stressful,” Brodie says. “But it was the only way of doing it. We just wanted to play.”
The IRB was threatening penalties for countries who competed. New Zealand and the Netherlands were among those who withdrew. For it to be viable, 12 teams were needed and a fortnight before the tournament Spain dropped out, so Scottish Students were drafted in as emergency replacements.
Then came another bump in the road. “Ten days before the start, we were told the Russians didn’t actually have anywhere to stay. And they were arriving in Manchester with no money and no transport,” Brodie says.
“I went on local radio and made an appeal – there was some momentum building around the tournament – and we got them two weeks’ accommodation at a nursing home in Livingston. It was right next to the rugby pitch, so they got a training facility, too.”
‘The more we drank, the more convinced we were that it was the best idea ever, it meant our dream was alive’
“It was seat-of-the-pants stuff,” Colamartino adds. “All they had with them when they arrived were lots of bottles of vodka and Russian dolls. Pizza Hut delivered them free pizzas every night and a minibus company gave them a bus for two weeks, but it broke down on the way to the game against us. So, they were late for that fixture.”
The Kazakhstan team, who brought a team hairdresser, travelled to Scotland in a bus. It took them three days. The Japanese flew in and wore identical bright red scrum caps in matches, which proved a commentator’s nightmare.
It was crazy stuff, the wild-west World Cup, but there was something about the tournament that captured the imagination. The crowds turned out; the coverage ballooned. For the amateurs playing, it was glorious.
“Those were absolutely the best days of my life,” Colamartino says. “The excitement, the buzz, the thrill of the crowd, the experience we got to share. It was incredible.”
The Scots exited at the quarterfinal stage, leaving England and defending champions United States to contest the final, which was shown on the BBC with the “Voice of Rugby” Bill Mclaren in the commentary box.
England won 38-23 to become world champions for the first time. The trophy and winners medals were theirs – except the medals did not have any reference to winners on them. “We didn’t have time to sort winners or runners-up medals, so every player in the tournament got the same one,” Colamartino says.
That evening, all the participants from the 12 nations met for a sendoff dinner and ceilidh at Edinburgh’s Grosvenor House Hotel. Hair was spectacularly let down. Right at the end of the evening, the fire alarm went off and everyone had to evacuate. It was a false alarm.
“The rumour was the Americans had set the alarm off to get everyone out so they could steal the trophy,” Colamartino says. “One of the ceilidh band, who was sober, recalls seeing the Canadian team on the fire engine outside singing and dancing. The firemen enjoyed that.”
It was a suitable way to bring down the curtain on a unique world championship which, 15 years later,
was finally granted World Cup status by the IRB.
It would have been the end of the story but for Colamartino. She thought it deserved a wider audience so, in a can-do style befitting of the 1994 World Cup itself, enrolled in a screen-writing class.
She wrote a rough draft and showed it to Ed Crozier, a former Scottish Rugby Union president who had been a touch judge at the tournament. He also happens to be a theatre producer. The story was then handed over to award-winning TV screenwriter Kim Millar, who was commissioned to write a new version that would be suitable for the stage.
The result is a musical and the production will be put on over the weekend of April 12-14. Tickets have already sold out and Crozier hopes to take the show to London for next year’s Women’s World Cup and who knows where beyond.
“It has all the makings of another Calendar Girls,” he says. “To me, this production is not totally about rugby, the way that Chariots of Fire wasn’t totally about athletics. It’s about overcoming adversity and getting something done against the odds. The way Eric Liddell won the 400 metres in 1924 is like the way these girls brought this over the finishing line. When people see this, I want them to think, ‘Anything is possible’.” Even putting on a World Cup in 90 days.
Tickets, priced £20, are available to watch a live stream performance of “90 Days” on April 13 at 8pm. See www.90daysplay.co.uk