North Herts sports grants: apply now!

Now is the time to apply for Sport North Herts grants. You can apply for a grant to help meet the cost of sports equipment, travel expenses within the UK, clothing specific to the sport, and training and competition fees.

In order to qualify for a grant you must have: 

• reached a regional or national standard
  
• be a permanent resident within the boundaries of North Hertfordshire District Council.
  
• have not received any direct financial assistance from North Herts District Council or Sport North Herts within the current financial year (1st April – 31st March).

The application form can be downloaded from here. There are two rounds of grants every year, so if you get into the regional squad in January you will be able to apply in May.

Sport North Herts newsletter

The latest newsletter from our local community sports network, "Sport North Herts", contains a number of interesting articles.

In particular, you may be interested in the front page feature "North Herts sporting heroes" which covers the Herts Sport Partnership's Service to Sport Awards at which 3 people from Letchworth rugby club - 2 of them from the girls section - were rewarded.

Not only that but the back page is given over to a full page article about Letchworth Girls' rugby.

And there's lots more intersting stuff inside, too.

For your own electronic copy of the newsletter, click here.

It could be worse...

When complaining about newspaper and media coverage of women's rugby its difficult to believe at times that it could be worse. But it could.

You may have thought that the next world cup is in 2010 - but there is a women's rugby world cup going on right now. Its nearly finished - the final will be is this weekend, between Australia and New Zealand - and England have finished third after a play-off earlier today. 

In case you haven't yet guessed this is Women's Rugby League World Cup. You may not have realised that there WAS an England women's team, never mind a world cup, but clearly there is. But you'd be forgiven for not knowing because media coverage has been practically nil. The tournament has no website, and even news pages on women's rugby league sites in Australia have been unable to compile a complete set of results. RFUW may like to have more media coverage, but the England union team are clearly media superstars compared with their league colleagues

So let's acknowledge the performance of the "other" England women's team. A little digging reveals that they were up against seven teams opponents - New Zealand, Pacific Islands, Australia, France, Russia, Samoa, and Tonga. England finished runners-up in their group with 74-0 and 54-4 wins over the Russia and France and a 22-4 defeat to Australia. On Wednesday they lost their semi-final 16-4 to New Zealand, resulting in today's third-place play-off against Pacific Islands which England won 20-0.

Rugby sets out case for inclusion in Olympics

Today was a big day for the IRB's bid to get rugby back into the Olympics when they formally presented their case to the IOC.

As mentioned before, their proposal is based on sevens rugby, rather than the full game, and would include a women's event. My personal view is that the IOC's acceptance of the IRB's bid would give a totally undeserved seal of approval for the IRB and major Union's levels of "support" for women's rugby, whereas a rejection might just persuade these bodies to join the 21st century. On the other hand, obviously many players of both sexes are excited about the possibility of becoming Olympians, so its not a view that is widely shared. This means you as the bid concerns the 2016 Olympics - its too late for the inclusion of any new sports to 2012 - so probably the players who would benefit most from its inclusion would be currently playing U18 rugby. 

This has come about as a result of the dropping of baseball and softball from the games. Both of these sports are bidding to return, as are four others - golf, squash, roller skating, and karate. This is pretty stiff opposition. Rugby's main "selling point" seems to be the low cost of an event - no extra facilities needed - but the IRB do have a tendency to exagerate their claims about the number of countries where the game is played at a high level.  

Only two of the sports bidding for a place in the games can "win" - and there is no guarantee that any will be chosen (none received enough votes last time around). Looking at the coverage beyond the rugby media I suspect that the favourites may be baseball and softball - both because the reasons for their rejection seem to have been rather dodgy, and also because a leading bidder for the 2016 games is Chicago. Squash has also spent many years building support, and roller skating would appeal to the IRB's wish to attract a "youth" audience (and a whole new sponsorship stream). In the end, whether you support rugby's bid or not, you have to agree that the game will really have to work very hard indeed over the next eleven months if it is to even avoid elimination in the early rounds of voting. It should beat golf - but I wouldn't bet on rugby getting the vote ahead of anything else.

Arrangements for Sunday, 16th November

This Sunday both the U15s and U18s are travelling to Hertford RFC for matches involving several clubs. The U18s are taking part in a match involving the hosts, Stevenage and ourselves while the U15s are joining with Hertford and Saracens in their game.

All players need to arrive at Hertford by 11.15am (11.30am latest) as the first game is planned to kick off at noon.

Please meet at the Letchworth club by 10.30am on Sunday to travel to Hertford.

Guardian positive about the future of women's rugby

Clearly the moon was blue last night - one of our national newspapers has acknowledged the existance of women's rugby! Admittedly the article only appears on one of the Guardian's journalist's blogs, rather than actually making the printed page, and it only narrowly avoids being totally patronising, but still its a start.

The article concentrates mainly on Saracens, and in particular Maggie Alphonsi, but does include reference to the 2010 World Cup. However what is interesting is the writer's last couple of paragraphs where she gives her own opinion about the direction the game should take, at least at club level. It does betray a certain lack of knowledge, but nonetheless coming from outside the sport its an interesting view.

Herts County v. Worcestershire on November 30th

Just a reminder that all players at Herts County training last weekend were asked to let the Herts County managers know of their availability for the U15 and U18 matches at Worcester and the U12 game against Kent on November 30th. This also applies to any players who were not at that training session but wish to be considered for the Herts County teams.

The relevant managers are :
U18 : Dave Marques : harleybloke@btinternet.com
U15 : Peter McCullough : peter.mccullough@ntlworld.com
U12 : John Birch : johnbirch@ntlworld.com

If you haven't already done so, please remember to let them know as soon as possible if you are available for the games on November 30th.

Angry Girl - the making of the book (UPDATED)

Several people had some good things to say about the book produced for Hayley's 18th yesterday, and some wanted to know how it was done. The answer is via the website lulu.com - the same site responsible for producing the last two team calendars.

**The complete book can now be viewed online**

If you fancy doing your own book (or calendar) for someone - perhaps as an unusual Christmas or birthday present - its pretty simple (and quite fun, even artistic) to do, even more so now than in the past as they've made the site even easier to use. 

You will need around 40 or so good quality digital or scanned images - at least in the order of 1024x768 pixels (and probably bigger) - but even the cheapest moden digital cameras will manage that.

The cost rather depends on the size of the book - and the £/$ exchange rate that day - and the result takes about 10 days to arrive if you use the cheapest mail option (the cost of which also depends on how many copies you order).

"Not the National" 10s hits the press

Signs that the "Not The RFUW" National 10s is still very much alive comes from a well-informed article that has appeared in the local press in Gloucestershire.

The article highlights the success of the tournament in attracting nationwide - even international - interest, and also sponsorship. It also touches on the less than enthusiastic responses from elsewhere (I don't foresee a similarly positive write-up in Touchline any time soon) - and we get a mention too!

In fact we are doing pretty well for positive press in the west-country - looks like one of Gloucester RFC's supporters' clubs is a regular reader of this blog!

New county coach makes winning start

I don't have the full details, but I hear that our old coach has come up trumps in his first match in charge of the Gloucestershire county team with a win against... someone. Not sure who as the girls county teams do not exactly feature prominently on the county RFU's website. 

Like not at all in fact...

So if Joe or anyone else (maybe one of the girls from Gloucestershire, if they are reading this?) can fill in a few details...

Help us win some cash

A new source of funding for sports clubs has been launched. Cash 4 Clubs is offering up to £1,000 per club - essentially you just have to bid and say what you want the money for. However before you even get to the bidding stage you need to collect some newspaper vouchers, for which we need your help. 

Simply turn to page 83 in this week's Comet newspaper, cut out the voucher, and give it to Mike on Thursday. Then we can start to think about how to spend the money (big, warm, subsuits are high on the list!).

No room for women in Commonwealth Games rugby

The expansion of sevens rugby in recent years, and women's sevens in particular, has been quite remarkable. A few days ago it was confirmed that the Pan American Games would include rugby sevens for the first time at the next games in 2011. The Asian Games also now includes sevens, and famously the IRB are pushing for sevens at the Olympic Games.

All of these competitions will include both men's and women's events, which makes it all the more unfortunate that the multi-sport games that really set this ball rolling - the Commonwealth Games - will continue to be male-only for the foreseeable future (ie. the Glasgow games in 2014 at least).

The Commonwealth Games are important to the sport as they include more rugby-playing members than any other "regional" games - only France, out of the eight IRB founder members, are wholly absent (though the Irish team will somewhat depleted), so the continued absence of women players is all the more is significant. As a policy it also means that when the 2011 Commonwealth Youth Games take place in the Isle of Man there will also be no room for any girls in the (boys-only) rugby tournament.

I wrote to the Commonwealth Games Federation and asked why and - perhaps partly as a result of this blog's profile - I was delighted to have a couple of very full answers.

The lack of girls at the Isle of Man's Youth Games is being put down to a question of numbers.

The philosophy behind the Youth Games is quite different to the main games in that the Federation want to ensure that it remains small enough to ensure that small nations like the Isle of Man are able to host the Games in the future. When you consider that the Games will attract 250 officials/support staff and 1,000 spectators we could not accommodate any more people on our small Island for an event of this kind.

We were advised to host a maximum of one team game and warned that it would not be easy to host any team games so we have been ambitious in putting rugby sevens in the programme. With a maximum of 1,000 competitors and 71 Commonwealth nations it is probable that most teams will actually be allocated less numbers for the whole team than they would need for a rugby sevens squad. The Welsh Team Management said that they would love to send a rugby sevens team in 2011 but that would only happen if we increased the size of their total team beyond the number they had in Pune. We are under no illusions that deciding on the allocation of team sizes to each nation is going to be extremely difficult.

With all of the above issues to consider, although we would ideally prefer to make all of the sports male and female, I am afraid it will not be possible for 2011.

In short, if there had to be a girls event then there would be no rugby sevens at all.

I can't say I am entirely sympathetic about this as inevitably this means that there will be more opportunities for boys to take part in these games than girls - which seems to be blatantly discriminatory. My suspicion is that when the IoM organisers were looking at whether they would include sevens they did not even consider that there should be a girls event as well - and where could this lack of awareness come from? Perhaps the main Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF)? Why - even in 2014 - will their event still be male only, nearly 10 years after the Asian Games managed to include a women's event?

The answer to this was rather interesting. It seems that back in 2006/7 when the Glasgow games were being planned the CGF sought advice from all sport governing bodies about how events should be run:

The CGF and Host City take a recommendation from the International Federation for a programmed sport as to which format and which events are included in a specific edition of the Games and the IRB may indeed look to recommend the inclusion of women’s rugby 7s in the Commonwealth Games in the future, particularly as they look to further the sport’s Olympic ambitions. This would in due course be considered by the CGF Sports Committee and Host or Candidate Cities.

...

If you wish to voice your support for the inclusion of women in the 7s event it would be a good idea to write to the IRB.

In short, the CGF asked the IRB, and the IRB only advised them to have a men's tournament. I have no reason to doubt the CGF on this, not least because the official I have been in contact with - Sue Whitworth - actually plays rugby. 

This advice from the IRB would have been very recent - 2007 according to the CGF - which is a bit of a puzzle. Could this is the same IRB that is promoting itself as being all for equality when it comes to the Olympic bid? Further indication then when it comes to equality at the top levels of the game the words "skin deep" spring to mind.

Guinness Premiership club adopts leading women's team

Yet another interesting development from the South West region - Guinness Premiership club Bristol have adopted Clifton, one of the leading women's premiership teams (for details see here). From next season Clifton will be renamed Bristol Ladies and will come under the same sponsorship deal as the Bristol men's team. They will, however, continue to play at Clifton RFC.

While its pretty obvious why Clifton Ladies are taking this step  (ie. money), it is interesting that Bristol's reason for supporting women's rugby is all about developing strong links in the community. They can already boast a strong mini and junior programme - women's rugby was clearly seen as the missing piece. At the moment they don't have a girls team, however - maybe St Marys' Old Boys Girls' (the only girls' team in Bristol) will be having a knock on the door shortly...

Looking wider Bristol are actually just following a strong trend among Guinness Premiership clubs, especially in the south west. As we know, Worcester have taken women's and girls' rugby very seriously for many years, and over the past year or so Gloucester and Bath have started to develop strong girls' programmes (not necessarily with RFUW's approval, from what we hear - not that that seems to bother either of them!).

Outside the South West...

• London Irish burst on the girls' rugby scene last season (not without controversy - the simultaneous overnight disappearance of "Cranberley" cluster was not an unrelated event). 
• Harlequins have had a women's and a growing girls' team for some time
• Saracens have also had a girls' and women's team for many years as we know - although in their case of Sarries the link with the professional club does not seem to go much beyond the name.
• And just outside the Premiership Bedford Blues are also trying to develop a girls section.

Overall what all this means is that seven out of the 12 Guinness Premiership clubs now have significant women's or girls' sections. Ultimately these are all businesses and they are choosing to move into the female game for hard financial reasons - they see that a strong women's and girls' game can only grow rugby in their areas, which will ultimately benefit their clubs. 

Its all good news for women's and girls' rugby. One of the factors behind the rapid expansion and acceptance of women's soccer over the past ten years or so has been the adoption or formation of women's teams by premiership teams. Once clubs like Arsenal began to field a women's team the game became much more high profile and much more accepted. Players gained access to better coaching and training facilities - and teams also got access to the professional club's promotional muscle. On the downside many traditional centres of the women's game at less fashionable clubs lost out - it wasn't popular with the game's old guard - but there is not doubt that it has been good for that sport. The increasing support of women's and girls' rugby by the professional rugby teams promises to be just as good for this game as well.

England Sky TV deal to include (some) women's rugby

An exclusive deal between Sky TV and the RFU as announced today which will mean that from 2010 to 2015 all England men's games, excluding six nations games, will only be available on Sky.

At this headline level this is not that different from previous deals, but what is interesting, is that in the small print (and for the first time) Sky's TV deal specifically includes women's rugby - more specifically the World Cup in 2010. While in 2006 it was possible to follow most of England's games on via a (rather unreliable) Pay Per View internet stream, with the BBC showing the final, and in 2002 some short highlight packages were shown, this should mean that the tournament will get better mainstream TV coverage than ever before in the UK (as well as appearing on the internet via Sky Player).

However this is also the only mention of women's rugby in the deal. While the contract specifically includes all men's age group and Saxons matches, when it comes to the women's game only the World Cup is mentioned. If it is a success maybe they will show more women's games, but at this stage they are not requred to do so. This is a pity and a missed opportunity - TV packages signed by Sky for other sports have included a requirement to show a certain number of women's games, much to the benefit of those sports. Surely the RFU could have pressed a similar case for rugby - I cannot believe that a demand to show, maybe, one home international per season would have been a deal breaker.

There is no mention of women's club rugby, while the new deal does seem to give a complete and exclusive coverage to Sky for all domestic men's club rugby - the BBC lose even the Ango-Welsh EDF cup

The best laid plans and all that ...

The unfortunate cancellation of one of the most enjoyable events of the rugby calendar - the Rochford 10s tournament - left us at a bit of a loose end this weekend but our neighbours at Ampthill and Stevenage stepped forward to fill the void in our fixture list.

Unfortunately, things didn't turn out quite as planned today when the 3 clubs - depleted by injury and school holiday absentees - got together for games at Legends Lane. The trouble was that the teams were rather more depleted than we had expected and the U15s had to settle for a joint training session while the U18s fared somewhat better by playing a 7s game between a Letchworth/Stevenage team in Letchworth colours and an Ampthill/Letchworth team in Ampthill colours.

It was a good game with plenty on crunching tackles going in on both sides and some fine breakaway tries in the best traditions of 7s rugby, most notably by Carla who ran fully 80 metres to score her third try in the closing minutes of the game. Jess also scored a super hattrick and Nikki converted all 6 of the Letchworth/Stevenage tries.

And, finally, the hattrick girls. Firstly, Jess storms under the posts for her third try (by the wonders of telephoto lenses, it looks to me as if she's going to bounce off the post protectors ... but she didn't, of course!) -

- and Carla sets off on her epic 80 metre dash for her third try -

The game was played in a fine spirit with all the players giving everything right up to the final whistle when the score was

Letchworth & Stevenage 42 Ampthill & Letchworth 10.

Letchworth scorers :

Tries : Jess (3), Carla (3)

Conversions : Nikki (6)

Ex-Legend takes to the field in Cambridge ....

News from Cambridge is that former Letchworth U18s captain, Katie, (shown here playing for Letchworth against Wimborne last season) played her first match for Queens' College on Thursday in their 15-7 victory over Jesus College.

Apparently, Queens' ladies train on the green outside the college observed by a considerable number of overseas tourists who, in the tradition of 21st century tourists everywhere, take holiday snaps of this quaint English custom!

Blog ratings - the good news, and the bad

With this - our 1,000th blog posting - I can report an exclusive preview of tomorrow's new blog rating shows us that we are up again -  this time three more places, so we are into the top ten of Wikio's list of the most influential UK sport blogs!

Unfortunately this hasn't proved quite good enough to hang onto the "top rugby blog" title as Total Flanker has done even better as its shot up seven places to sixth. Oh well, it was good while it lasted. Still, together we are leaving several soccer sites behind - in fact we, Letchworth Girls, are ahead of the fan sites of every football club other than Arsenal*.

1	Arseblog	8	Formula One Blog	15	Cycling Info
2	SoccerLens	9	Letchworth Girls' Rugby	16	Women's Rugby Review
3	F1 Fanatic	10	West Ham Till I Die	17	Footie Blog
4	King Cricket	11	West Ham Fans	18	FCB News
5	Gunnerblog	12	The Corridor (a cricket blog)	19	4sportsake.com
6	Total Flanker	13	BlogF1	20	BBC Sport Editors' Blog
7	Line and Length	14	Suave's Republique Cricket

*Not that I generally give a hoot for the round-ball game**, but it is fascinating to see which football clubs do not feature even in the top 100 despite - allegedly - having the largest fan base. I wonder what it says about the relative literary abilities (or lack thereof) of each club's supporters?

**I had to actually referee some soccer games at a couple of schools last week - first time I'd been actively invoved in anything to do with the sport for about 35 years. Had to restrain myself blowing for offside when the ball was kicked forward... Reminded of the story of when Hayley and Carla played the game for the first time at Highfield when apparently they took several minutes to realise that you could pass the ball forward.

Plans for the weekend: games for U15s and U18s!

If you missed training tonight (or even if you were there) a reminder that this weekend we have something of a Chiltern Challenge, or maybe Border Battle, or some such. Anyway - for the first time we will be playing host to both of our neighbours, Stevenage and Ampthill. 

At the moment numbers look sufficient for a triangular U18 "tournament", as well as a U15 match combining players from all clubs. In fact what we will be doing will be having an afternoon very like a South West region matchday (as featured earlier this week). 

Our guests are arriving at around 1pm, so kickoff c1.30 to 2.00.

How to find the nearest girls rugby team... to anywhere

I've just noticed that (without wanting to blow my own trumpet or anything) one result of my mapping of all the girls clubs last week is that if you now go into Google Maps and enter any town (or county) into the search bar along with "girls rugby" and you now get a map showing all the girls rugby teams near to that town, or in that county.

Some search results reveal other related sites, but that is the nature of a search engine. However, you can narrow down a search by age band (eg. adding U18 to the search string) or team size (eg. by adding "Category A").

I'm amazed - really I had no idea that Google Maps was a good as this. 

Sasha selected for England U20s squad!

Many congratulations to Sasha on being named in the 2008/9 England U20 squad announced by the RFUW today (see here). Commiserations to Hayley who got through to the final selection phase but just missed out this season.

The 34 player squad includes 16 new players, with 18 returning from last season. The latter includes both of the Inside Centres - the position Hayley was trialing for - so it was a particularly tough call for Hayley this time round. However next season at least one (and possibly both) of the existing players will be moving out of the age band, so with the additional advantage of another season's experience behind her Hayley's chances should be all the greater. Certainly all the reports back from the trials indicate that she looked very capable of playing at this level.

Sasha's electrifying performance at the last trial makes her selection no great surprise, but it is still a heck of an achievement. Overlooked by the TDGs last season, a different style of selection (based more on team play than drills) allowed her to show the selectors what she can really do. However, its not all over yet because Sasha will now be competing against three other props who already have their U20 caps for a place in the team to face Wales in April and the squad for the Nations Cup in June.

Other familiar names breaking into the squad for the first time include Lizzell Heather (Kettering, selected as a wing), Natalie McClarnon (ex-Basford, now Saracens, hooker), and Megan Williams (Welwyn, full-back).