Wasps Women

Before they conquered all, Wasps Women worked shifts in the club kitchen just to validate their existence. For forty years they’ve been the great entertainers of the women’s game, until they weren’t. When the men’s side imploded, the impact reverberated from Coventry down the M40, with the women’s team forced to leave the division they once dominated.

Twyford Avenue is abuzz. This humble outpost of elite rugby in west London – where changing rooms better resemble a primary school gymnasium and a wooden fence surrounds the pitch instead of a stand – is drawing its biggest crowd of the season. They have come from as far as Penzance and south Wales, include some of the most influential pioneers of the women’s game, and there are Red Roses, past and present, everywhere you look.

They have come with the fervour of a religious pilgrimage to watch Wasps Women’s last match as a top-flight team, bringing the curtain down on a 38-year residence in the top echelon of women’s rugby in England. And under a scorching early-June sun, the atmosphere is not one of condolence. As Wasps and Great Britain sevens player, Amy Wilson-Hardy, puts it ,“it’s like the funeral of an old, beloved friend.”

“That’s right,” adds Wasps captain and No.8 Liz Crake, “like when you go to a funeral and they tell you not to wear black.” Except there is lots of black, and gold, with Wasps jerseys from every vintage, on display. 

But, inevitably, there are tears. Before kick-off, Wasps fan Livi Moorbey, aged nine, is invited to read a poem she has written to the whole playing group. “With joy in your eyes, you play your hearts out,” reads out Livi, and players begin to tear up. Captain Liz is one of them. So too is head coach Laura-Jane Lewis, who follows on from Livi’s poem with her own emotional address to her players. 

Wasps’ opponents in their final act are Bristol Bears, who need to win today to shore up fourth spot in the league table and secure a semi-final. But far from being blinkered to the occasion, Bristol pay their own tribute to their opponents, with the four former Wasps players in their side wearing one Bristol sock, and one Wasps sock, Barbarians-style. A guard of honour then forms. Friends and family, fans and former players, line the route from changing room to pitch, foam fingers with ‘We are Wasps’ written on them pointing the players to their starting positions.  Wasps come out firing. The side have lost all their matches this season, conceding fifty points or more in twelve of their sixteen league games, but in this their swansong match, Liz and her team put their season’s woes behind them. In a quality first half showing Liz Musgrove, Tilly Vaughan-Fowler and Cris Blanco all scoring to give Wasps a 17-10 half-time lead. 

“We were playing really well,” says Liz. “And you could see people that I had played with years ago, when I first joined the club, all around the pitch, and we were scoring points, things we’re coming together and we were like, ‘this is such a good day’. But we knew the second half was going to be difficult because we knew they had a strong bench. Even though, it just felt good.”

Bristol do ring the changes in the second half, bringing on a bomb squad of Sarah Bern, Lark Davies and Simi Pam in the front row. The substitutes give the Bears impetus and a hat trick from Davies allows them to pull away and win 41-22. Yet a determined Wasps have the final say, a try from Makeda Lewis seeing them earn a try-scoring bonus point, just their second league point of the whole season. 

It’s a far cry from how things were at the start of the Premier 15s era, when Wasps were a fixture of the play-offs from 2017 to 2021, but the scenes at the final whistle are of celebration. In just completing their season’s fixture list, Wasps, in many ways, have done the impossible. With a thread-bare playing squad, against teams with three times their operating budget, they got through it with just one fixture forfeited. And what’s more: the coaches and the players still enjoyed the ride. They deserve a drink. Several, in fact. 

Those on the sidelines swarmed the pitch to be with the players. Among them were club legends Sue Day, Giselle Mather, Shelley Rae, Helen Harding and Sue Martineau. Martineau had been the force behind the establishment of Wasps Women in 1985, and although she too was in celebratory mood, she admits to feeling a deep loss for how a 38-year history has come to a close, and for what Wasps’ demise says about the state of the women’s game. “I felt very sad for the team and the management and everyone that has worked so very hard,” Sue tells Rugby Journal. “But on the other hand it was just wonderful to see the support for them in this last game. It solidified the fact that we are such a strong community. So there was a lot of sadness but also a lot of, ‘wow there’s so much love here’.

“But do you know what’s incredibly sad is that it [professionalising the women’s game] was not about who was the best team, it was who could put up the money and who has the ground. Teams like Richmond for example, just disappeared. They lost all their players to Harlequins who weren’t anywhere near as good as them, they just had the money.

“It’s sad that the sport has got to this, where communities are split up because someone down the road can offer the money that the community you have grown up with, and that has given you everything, can’t. I reflect back and think we had it hard. But we never had that problem of our team not sticking together. We are such a tight community because we were allowed to build those communities.”

The difficulties which Sue and her team-mates faced in order to get a team on the pitch in the 1980s, with kit, and with access to the clubhouse afterwards, were big enough.

“We were doing shifts in the kitchen to allow us to play,” explains Sue. “As much as Wasps were incredibly welcoming and inclusive and wanted to integrate us into the club, they didn’t think twice about saying, ‘do you think you could get the girls together on a Saturday to do a shift in the kitchen to feed the men?’. The men weren’t feeding us on the Sunday when we played our game. But it’s something we accepted. In those days we just so desperately wanted to play that we would do anything.

“We even went to play Waterloo once, and we went to go in the bar afterwards and they had someone on the door stopping us because women still weren’t allowed in the bar, even though we’d played on the pitch, which is just extraordinary isn’t it?”

Extraordinary but not exceptional. Before they founded a women’s team, Wasps themselves didn’t allow women into their bar at Repton Avenue, with the players’ wives telling Sue they used to head to a room at the end of the stand where drinks were brought out to them. However, as soon as Sue introduced the idea of women’s rugby to the Wasps committee, they took to it with the zeal of the converted. 

Sue’s proposal to Wasps came out of necessity. As she approached graduation at Loughborough in 1985 – and having secured a job in London – she needed to find a club for herself and her university mates to play at. They were turned away by the women’s team at Finchley – one of the established sides at the time – but were told by a Wasps player that she should go to the club’s AGM and state her case.

“I did a speech to a hundred men and told them why they should have a women’s team,” says Sue. “I was talking about inclusivity and diversity, even then, 38 years ago. I went back to university but soon got a letter saying we want you and we want you integrated.

“People like Ivor Montlake and John Langley were so supportive I can’t tell you. And Peter Yarrington, who said ‘what do you need?’, and I told him we want the black kit, because that’s what the men play in, and we want baths after our matches, just like the men. They were forward-thinking older guys, which is just a delight to reflect back on.”

With Sue as the driving force, Wasps changed from a club that didn’t allow women into their bar to being the first elite men’s club to run a women’s team. Richmond followed their lead a year later, then joined in Saracens. Other notable women’s teams at the time included University College London, Bromley and the aforementioned Finchley. “It was always a hot contest between us, Richmond and Saracens, and the bulk of England’s players came from these three clubs, but teams started popping up all over the place,” says Sue.

Sue didn’t make it to full international status herself but she did play at Twickenham in the first ever women’s rugby match on the hallowed turf, the cup final against Richmond. Despite injury, there was no chance she was missing it. 

“Ten days before I broke my arm,” Sue recalls. “Can you imagine? I was devastated. But my coach said to me ‘I will cut off your cast’, and he took me to an American Football shop in Earls Court and got the smallest, soft cast possible. 

“Our physio, I won’t say who, took her scissors from work and cut my cast off and put this soft cast on with sponges underneath and I managed to play. So any pictures you see of me in that game, I have a fat arm, and that was all the padding. 

“Richmond tried to pull a fast one as they knew I had broken my arm but saw me in the changing rooms getting ready. So the next thing I know, I get called in by the ref who said ‘it’s been reported that you’ve got a broken arm, we need to check your cast.’ And I said ‘no, I’ve only got a sprained wrist.’ I had taken a lot of pain killers as you can imagine. But that’s the passion. It was do or die. In those days pre-kids, rugby was my life.”

That day at Twickenham came in 1988, and Sue’s Wasps side won 19-0. And success for Wasps Women would keep coming meaning that at the turn of the millennium they were still one of the premier clubs in the land.

Fiona Stockley recalls joining the club in 2001 and being awestruck by the quality of the players around her. “At my first training session, there was Shelley Rae, Sue Day and Paula George and that was the norm. When I made my debut I was the only uncapped player in the side, everyone else was a full international. We also had a really global team with Canadians like Raquel Eldridge, and Alexia Massacand, who played second row for France. Our team was from all over.”

Not long after ‘Stockers’ joined Wasps, the club won three consecutive league titles between 2003 and 2005, as well as the cup and the national sevens. “That was a real pearler for the club, a real good moment of success and I don’t think we’ve been able to quite get back that level,” she continues. “But when the Premier 15s started we were always in the top four. Last season was the first time we didn’t make top four.”

It can be argued that the ushering in of the Premier 15s era in 2017, spelled the beginning of the end for Wasps Women as an elite force. Perhaps this is overly revisionist, however the move to professionalising the women’s game undoubtedly fired the starting gun on an arms race that moved too quickly for Wasps Women to keep up with.

Before delving into how that race was lost, it’s important to understand that in 2017, Wasps Women were run exclusively by the community club Wasps FC, based in Twyford Avenue in west London; Wasps RFC were a separate entity running the professional men’s team in Coventry. 

In 2017, Wasps FC Chairman Richard Green saw an opportunity to try and engage Wasps RFC to slingshot Wasps Women into this brave new women’s rugby world that was unfolding. “When it became obvious that there as going to be a professional league set up, we went to see the new owner at Wasps RFC [Derek Richardson]. We said the next big thing is going to be women’s rugby, we’ve been doing it down at Wasps FC for a long time and we’re one of the first ever rugby clubs to do it, would you like to get involved?

“But we were unable to persuade them to invest in any way in the women’s team. So I turned round to the committee at Wasps FC and said ‘we’ve got the opportunity to be a founding member of the first professional women’s league, we’ve got to do it.’

“The first thing we did was take on Giselle [Mather] as coach, as I knew she was the right person. And those first three years were really enjoyable [with Wasps making the semi-finals three seasons in a row]. She transformed us from part-time amateurs to semi-pro athletes, it was great. The same team in our third year would have beaten the team in the first year by fifty points, even though it was the same players.”

“It was a golden period, as we were punching above our weight, beating sides like Harlequins who were paying players, yet as an avowed amateur club, our girls were still paying their subs. So it was classic Wasps, punching above our weight.”

When the second phase of the Premier 15s came around [which saw Richmond and Waterloo lose their places in the league to Exeter and Sale], the arms race was beginning to start.

“We had to keep up with the Joneses, so we started engaging Coventry again,” continues Richard. “We said to them ‘we are not going to pay the players; you are going to have to.’ So we ran the programme, but players who needed to be paid, were paid by Coventry. 

“Things evolved whereby the budget was going up and up and up. Matchday fees were beginning to get higher. Medicines, better S&C, better analysis, it was all costing more, but we were stuck with our relatively small budget from the FC. So every time Giselle wanted something extra, we had to go cap in hand to ask Derek.”

In 2017, Wasps’ operating budget was around £150,000 for the season, which was covered by Wasps FC and the RFU. By the summer of 2022, the operating budget had crept to over £600,000. Wasps FC were putting in about £100,000 of that, there was a small grant from the RFU, and the rest was being met by Wasps RFC in Coventry.

So when Wasps RFC declared bankruptcy in October 2022, it not only wiped out the men’s professional side but also left a black hole in Wasps Women’s finances. It left them starting the season with an operating budget of just £200,000; by comparison, Richard reckons teams at the top end of the table were operating on a budget of around £700,000 this season – more than three times more. 

Matters worsened when an additional £100,000 that had been pledged by sponsors to the women’s team failed to come good. “We were very let down by sponsors,” says Richard, “including sponsors who claimed to be promoters of women’s sport and none of them came good. We didn’t get a penny from them.” 

A ball was yet to be kicked in the league, yet the die was cast for Wasps Women. As Richard puts it: “how can you compete against full-time athletes, if you’re not even part-time?” 

Internationals such as Abby Dow and new signing Lenaig Corson left the club to protect their international careers, with several squad players also migrating to other Premier 15s clubs. But the final nail in the coffin came in December when Wasps Women, along with DMP Sharks, were not selected for the next cycle of the Premier 15s, with Ealing and Leicester offered places instead.

This would be their last season, and just making it to the end became their new aim. “When everyone was made redundant on October 17 last year, my directive changed,” explains head coach Laura-Jane Lewis, known to all as ‘LJ’. “Winning and losing, we didn’t talk about that anymore. Instead it was about ensuring we could put out a team every week, with players in the right state to complete the season. Player welfare was at the heart of that because some of my team were very young, some had never played in the Prem before, or had never played Prem rugby regularly, it became a massive challenge.

“But it was also about making sure our players achieved what they wanted to out of the season,” she continues. “Our captain Liz Crake still had international ambitions with England. Fi Cooper hadn’t played Premier 15s rugby before but now Scotland have started to take an interest by including her in Six Nations training squads. Andrea Stock is another player who is now on Ireland’s radar. Helene Caux has been making her mark in defence and attack and has led our lineout whilst becoming a huge leader for us.” 

LJ also clung on to her belief that the team should still be having fun. To that end, social secretary Polly Roberts came to the fore with stacks of quizzes to while away long bus journeys after heavy defeats.

In her coaching, LJ brought in more a more games-focused approach. “It [the season] strengthened my philosophy, on coaching and on life as well. If you stick to your values, you are going to get something out of it. And whether you are winning or losing you can still have a lot of fun, which is why players stuck around. I’m happy that our players will have had lots of rugby exposure this season and will have been enriched as players by the experience.”

For Liz Crake, an overdue international call-up (at age 28) came despite the heavy losses her club were suffering week-in week-out.

“I was always on an uphill battle anyway because I didn’t come through the pathway,” explains Liz. “I’m older and they want to have Red Roses that are going to play for them for years. So to achieve that [be capped] at Wasps, this season, and to do it for LJ and Oli [Bishop], who stayed at the club so we can play … yes, I’d been working on it for years, but you just need someone to push you and motivate you, and help you get there and they really did that for me this year.”

Liz played two games for England in the Six Nations, coming off the bench against both Scotland and Italy. “In the first game I just didn’t want to mess up and for them to go ‘actually why did we bring you into the squad, you were rubbish’. But against Italy every time they kicked off it went to me, so I felt I got a chance to show why I was there.”

A little piece of history Liz now owns is being the most recent Wasps player – male or female – to win a cap for England whilst playing for the club. And there’s no knowing how long it will before another Wasps player makes the England grade. It may never happen. 

Wasps, however, hasn’t died. This is a point everyone makes to us at Twyford Avenue. Wasps is still a large community club in west London, with five senior men’s teams, a youth section for boys and girls and a full complement of mini rugby age groups. There’s also two amateur women’s teams under their banner, with the first team competing in the National Challenge 1 South East division along with sides like Chesham, Barnes, Reading and Oxford Harlequins.

“So many people have said to me ‘oh my God, no more women’s rugby at Wasps’. But there is,” says Sue. “Wasps is still here, just not in the top flight. And there’s a thriving, thriving women’s side, two sides actually.”

Wasps FC chairman Richard continues: “One of the big projects next year is to build the women’s section into one of the best amateur women’s sections in the country. And I truly believe there will be elite rugby in a Wasps shirt again. I believe that fully for the women and I am pretty convinced of it for the men too.

“Our role at the moment however, is to keep getting people out in a Wasps shirt on a rugby field. We will keep churning out players at all levels. Our line stops at whether we will pay players or not, and we won’t, so by definition there is a limit to where any of our teams can go. But we’ll be out there next season with hundreds and hundreds of people playing rugby every weekend.”

There have long been Wasps in west London, and the good news is, there still are. 

Story by Jack Zorab

Pictures by  Danté Kim

This extract was taken from issue 22 of Rugby.
To order the print journal, click here.