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The brilliant prediction Hannah Botterman has made about RWC 2025
By PA
England prop Hannah Botterman is certain the Red Roses will fill all 82,000 seats at Twickenham when her side host the World Cup in 2025. Long gone are the days when England were content to pack Doncaster’s 5,000-capacity Castle Park or even Twickenham Stoop, which holds 14,800 and hosted the 2010 World Cup final.
The Red Roses have already sold more than 40,000 tickets for their final Six Nations encounter with France at Twickenham on April 29, and could be on course to break the world attendance record for a women’s rugby match, 42,579, set at last year’s World Cup in New Zealand.
Asked if that tally could double in three years’ time, Botterman was emphatic, telling the PA news agency: “Yes. Yes, is the answer. It is obviously really exciting that the tournament for the Six Nations hasn’t even started, yet we have already sold 40,000, that’s obviously half of where we want to be.
“Come 2025, a few years down the line, the biggest tournament you can play in your career at home, I think we can get there.”
That side could look quite different from the one set to face newly-professionalised Scotland in Saturday’s Six Nations opener at the 10,200-capacity Kingston Park, with England aiming to win their fifth consecutive trophy and fourth straight Grand Slam after the latter was not contested in 2021 due to the pandemic.
Head coach Simon Middleton, who guided the Red Roses to World Cup finals in 2017 and 2022 – England finished runners-up to New Zealand on both occasions – is set to step down following the tournament after nearly eight years in the role. Captain Sarah Hunter, England’s most capped player, also said she would be hanging up her boots after Saturday’s opener in her native Newcastle, and a combination of injuries, a pregnancy and personal circumstances meant nine uncapped players were named in Middleton’s 42-player training squad.
Botterman said: “It’s an end of an era and sad to see both of them go, especially Sarah obviously, with everything she has done for the game, but Simon as well. It’s important that we change for the good going forward. Obviously, we will have a new coach coming in and it will be really interesting to see what sort of spin on things they bring.
“When I got my first cap it was due to there being quite a few injuries and you have just got to take that opportunity and you have got to run with it. It’s going to give these new players a real bite to want to come back and, even when these players are fit, giving them a run for their money.”
The 23-year-old was speaking at Twickenham, where the Women’s Sport Trust, England Rugby and O2 announced the launch of a long-term visibility study aiming to uncover data that could help grow the women’s game in the lead-up to the 2025 World Cup.
Botterman’s rehabilitation from the knee injury she sustained the day before England’s World Cup semi-final is progressing well and the Saracens forward hopes to be fit for England’s fourth-round meeting with Ireland.
Some have suggested a woman should be targeted as Middleton’s successor, but the 23-year-old disagreed, insisting every qualified candidate should be considered. “I want the best person for the job,” she said. “It would be a disservice to ourselves if we just put a woman in as head coach and they weren’t the best person for the job.
"Yes, it’s important to have that representation, 100 per cent but at the same time, we just want the best person. The gap between us and other teams has gotten a lot smaller and it’s how can we grow that? How can we keep on getting better? So it’s really important for me that they’re ruthless and they’ve got a bit about them, but also have a bit of compassion and understand how us as women work.”
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Stephen Larkham, Mick Byrne, Scott Wisental, Ben Mowen, Les Kiss, Jim McKay, Rod Kafer.
There are plenty of great Australian coaches who could do a better job than Schmidt.
Go to commentsThis piece is nothing more than the result of revisionist fancy of Northern Hemisphere rugby fans. Seeing what they want to see, helped but some surprisingly good results and a desire to get excited about doing something well.
I went back through the 6N highlights and sure enough in every English win I remembered seeing these exact holes on the inside, that are supposedly the fallout out of a Felix Jones system breaking down in the hands of some replacement. Every time the commentators mentioned England being targeted up the seam/around the ruck or whatever. Each game had a try scored on the inside of the blitz, no doubt it was a theme throughout all of their games. Will Jordan specifically says that Holland had design that move to target space he saw during their home series win.
Well I'm here to tell you they were the same holes in a Felix Jones system being built as well. This woe is now sentiment has got to stop. The game is on a high, these games have been fantastic! It is Englands attack that has seen their stocks increase this year, and no doubt that is what SB told him was the teams priority. Or it's simply science, with Englands elite players having worked towards a new player welfare and management system, as part of new partnership with the ERU, that's dictating what the players can and can't put their bodies through.
The only bit of truth in this article is that Felix is not there to work on fixing his defence. England threw away another good chance of winning in the weekend when they froze all enterprise under pressure when no longer playing attacking footy for the second half. That mindset helped (or not helped if you like) of course by all this knee jerk, red brained criticism.
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