‘Having too many Red Roses in same place is not good for competition’
Wasps’ Giselle Mather hopes salary cap will see England players better shared among clubs, she tells Fiona Tomas
For Giselle Mather, the Wasps Ladies’ director of rugby, communicating with her players through the video conference app Zoom has been something of an epiphany during the lockdown. “I’d never even heard of it before,” she says. “But I think I can feed back much more effectively to the individual players with this, it’s fantastic.”
Virtual strength-and-conditioning workouts have also helped keep her squad ticking over. In fact, Zoom is proving something of a lifeline for Mather’s players, some of whom chalked up just four months of rugby last season in the Premier 15s, the country’s top-flight women’s rugby union competition. “The Premier 15s had nine weeks off for the Six Nations,” says Mather. “That’s ridiculous. Players haven’t played since the end of January. Playing through the Six Nations is maybe something we have to start looking at.”
To add to Mather’s frustration, it is unlikely these international breaks, which are scheduled into the calendar to maintain the integrity of the league, will be stopped from next season when two significant changes to the league will be implemented.
Development sides at each Premier 15s club are being scrapped, with squads reduced from 60 players to 40, the idea being to reduce the emerging gap between the leagues. “The next structure down, the Championship, will be a much stronger league,” insists Mather. “There will be relationships forming between the Premier 15s and the Championship so that will be much better, the players in the game will improve which has got to be a good thing. But the Premier 15s needs pathways.”
There will also be the introduction of a £60,000 salary cap and this, in particular, has piqued Mather’s curiosity. It could upset the status quo among clubs whose sides are stacked with international players such as Saracens, Harlequins and Loughborough Lightning.
“What I’m hoping with the salary cap is that the Red Roses will be distributed better,” says Mather. “There were nine of them in the Harlequins squad last season, seven at Saracens. That doesn’t promote the best competition you can have. If there’s 10 teams with 30 contracts, that’s three each – that’s beautifully equated and it doesn’t always work that way – and suddenly you’ve got a real competition. When nine Red Roses plus other internationals are all in the same place, that’s not conducive to competition.”
Her wish might come true, given that the England fly-half, Katy Daley-mclean, has already been snapped up by Premier 15s newcomers Sale Sharks.
The premature ending of the Premier 15s season could inadvertently push clubs into rethinking how they organise their calendars. Harlequins pencilled in their annual “Game Changer” event for April 11 at the start of last September, with the idea being to capitalise on the buzz in the aftermath of the Women’s Six Nations, which ended up having over a third of fixtures cancelled due to the virus.
To that end, the pandemic has sounded a cautionary tale. Syncing hyped-up fixtures with the women’s international calendar – or scheduling them towards the business end of the domestic season – carries a risk. Mather can relate. This weekend, her side were due to play in the club’s annual fundraiser, “The Swarm”.
On the international scene, the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics to 2021 could be a wake-up call for unions to begin segregating their 15s and sevens programmes – just 41 days separate the end of the Games and the start of the World Cup in New Zealand.
“We’re all right from an England perspective because our 15s and sevens squads are separate,” says Mather, “But with other nations, they’re not.”
This is the last of our ‘Life After Chaos’ articles. To read the whole series, go to telegraph.co.uk/sport