The fixtures will not be confirmed until the final line-up is known but it will be a cross-pool format with each side playing three matches and there is every chance that the Red Roses could face the Black Ferns for the first time since losing last year’s World Cup final – and on New Zealand soil. World Rugby confirmed on Friday that New Zealand will host WXV1, with matches played in different cities across three weekends, Oct 21 and 28 and Nov 4.
Therein lies one of the flaws of this year’s launch event: two of those weekends clash with the men’s World Cup semi-finals and final, so how much exposure and cut-through will WXV get?
The “mission” of WXV, according to World Rugby’s press release, is to raise the profile of the women’s game but it is going to be hard to do that with the sport’s biggest event reaching its climax at the same time. The two tournaments may be taking place in different time zones but the focus of rugby fans and media will be firmly on events in France, with broadcasters in particular unlikely to have huge budgets or airtime to bid for the rights.
What you actually do is have all of these competitions on the same annual cycle, in the same place. As with mooted plan have the Nations’ Cup (ie, all the second line national teams who didn’t make the World Cup) in the same place and at the same time as the World Cup.
Every four years have that 6 week (?) jamboree of all rugby – major nations, minor, male and female – in the same place at the same time.
If nothing else the cross breeding certainties will improve the game in the next generation.
A second tier nations cup would be a great idea.
Would there be a temptation to lose a few games to get into that rather than be cannon fodder for the big nations in the actual world cup, I wonder.
I’ve been in 7s teams that have engineered a loss to get into a plate competition (which we had a chance to win) rather than the cup competition (which we had no chance to win). Worked a couple of times too.
When the Hampshire Plate knock-out was added to the Hampshire Cup competition (15-a-side), it was for lower ranked teams + teams knocked out in the first round of the Cup (which was monotonously won by Alton or Basingstoke at the time). We won the Hampshire Plate 3 of the first 4 years of the competition after being knocked out of the first round of the cup.
Despite it being impossible, this was all 25-30 years ago. Where TF did that time go?
Didn’t they try running some of the six nations women games alongside the men’s games, that doesn’t seem to be happening now so I assume it wasn’t a success
The best comment I heard about running women’s 7’s along with men’s was that it made it much easier to plan which games to skip over the weekend