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Netherlands vs France: The story of the first ever women's Test
As part of Women’s History Month, we retrace the steps that led to the first women’s Test match, between Netherlands and France on June 13, 1982.
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“There’s so much women’s rugby history in the Netherlands,” Sylke Haverkorn told me when we chatted in December, and the country’s former head coach was not wrong.
Over the next six weeks attention will be trained on events from Belfast to Twickenham, via Edinburgh, Cardiff, Brive, Leicester, Newport and elsewhere as the Six Nations provides the perfect taster for a record-breaking Women’s Rugby World Cup.
That this year’s championship will be played in such citadels of rugby is a sign of the growing appeal and popularity of the women’s game.
Yet the road to that recognition began in much more modest surrounds. Utrecht, the fourth largest city in the Netherlands, is not known as an oval-ball stronghold but it was there that the first women’s international was played.
On June 13, 1982, a squad representing the Netherlands welcomed France to Sportpark Strijland de Meern for a match that formed part of the Dutch union’s 50th anniversary celebrations.
The idea for the match had germinated following a meeting between the Nederlands Rugby Bond and head of the Association Française de Rugby Féminin (AFRF), Henri Fléchon.
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A referee, Fléchon had been so incensed by the attempts of the FFR to quell female participation in the 1970s that he became a fierce advocate for women playing rugby, and served as AFRF president for 11 years until his death in 1986.
In 1988, the first European Cup trophy would be named in his honour and competed for in his hometown Bourg-en-Bresse. Unsurprisingly, six years earlier, he readily accepted the offer to form a French team.
To put the date of the match into context, at the time the French team bus pulled into Utrecht in June 1982, following a 500km drive from the Parisian suburb of Chilly-Mazarin, there was only one women’s club in the UK not affiliated to a university, Magor Maidens in Wales.
It would be another 12 months before the first English club side, Finchley, was formed – shortly followed by Wasps – and a further two years before the Wiverns tour of England and France that did so much to capture the imaginations of players in the UK.
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For now though, Sportpark Strijland de Meern – a location chosen because maintenance work was being carried out at the Dutch union’s usual base in nearby Hilversum – was the centre of the women’s rugby universe.
The 21 Netherlands players selected to appear in the historic contest, some of whom had never played a full match of 15s, had been whittled down from an initial squad of 30 across five intense training sessions.
Dutch preparations had culminated in a training match in 30-degree heat, but fatigue could not dampen the elation felt by Leontien Hendriks and her teammates entrusted with taking on France.
Following the final training session, the centre and her Castricum club-mates drove the hour back to their clubhouse “full of joy and relief”, and then donned their bright new orange kit to cycle home.
“Crazy,” Hendriks admitted in a diary entry written shortly after the final whistle against France. “However, we felt so relieved that we were chosen in the line-up.”
There was a similar feeling among the 22 players selected to play for France, although it was tinged with frustration. Before boarding their long bus journey on June 12, the squad had been presented with a new white kit featuring the famous three stripes of Adidas, but not the traditional emblem of French rugby.
“We were not allowed to wear the rooster because we were a women’s federation. We had a tricolour badge instead,” Monique Fraysse, who would line up in the French centres alongside twin sister Nicole, told World Rugby in 2020.
It was in their new strips that the two squads walked proudly onto the pitch in Utrecht on June 13 and lined up to hear their national anthems in front of a crowd including journalists from Dutch publications the Nieuwe Revue and Panorama.
“Everyone was so nervous,” Hendriks wrote later. “Before the kick-off was taken, we sang and heard the national anthems. A real International!”
At 14:00 local time, referee Roel Wijmans – “a real Belgian (in the negative sense)” according to Hendriks – blew his whistle to signal the start of the first ever women’s Test match.
What followed, perhaps unsurprisingly given the greater 15s experience in the visiting team, was an exercise in attack versus defence.
That said, the Dutch players acquitted themselves superbly and playing a forward-dominated game were able to hold France scoreless in the first half.
Unbeknown to Hendriks and her backline colleagues, Dutch coach Bode had told his pack to keep the ball up front. “It was a pure forwards game,” the centre wrote. “They had played wonderfully.”
But unfortunately for the hosts, they were unable to keep France at bay for the whole 80 minutes. Fittingly it was some electric back play that proved their undoing, the ball surging from fly-half Odette Desprats, through the Fraysse sisters and full-back Viviane Berodier, onto winger Isabelle Decamp, who crossed the whitewash.
Decamp’s unconverted try – worth four points at the time – gave the visitors a deserved 4-0 win, although a curious report in the Dutch magazine Panorama suggested France had been “sweet looking but dastardly”.
Hendriks admitted the game had been “very disappointing for the [Dutch] three quarters… But all in all, it was an amazing experience.”
The hosts presented the victors with a bottle of wine and following speeches, the French squad extended an invitation to the Netherlands to play a return match the following year.
France would win that one too, 10-0 in front of 1,500 fans on June 5, 1983, and the teams would meet seven times in total before the end of the decade.
“We were not immediately aware that we were living a historical moment,” Berodier said. “But we did hope that there will be other opportunities after that.”
“Representing France meant that women’s rugby would be able to move forward,” Monique Fraysse added. “We were there, we were not going to back down!”
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France made a lot for european rugby dévelopment …. A lot more than World Rugby….