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Wales confident they've laid off-field foundations amid World Cup wreckage
Shaun Connor summed up the situation facing Wales succinctly ahead of their final Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 assignment.
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“We won’t come together for a while now and to go away suffering three defeats will be hard for us to take,” the Wales backs coach said as he spoke to reporters in the Sandy Park weights room last Friday. “We need to get a result.”
Outside the sun was shining and the players appeared in high spirits as they put the finishing touches to their preparation for Fiji the following day.
Belinda Moore, head of women’s rugby at the Welsh Rugby Union (WRU), would not have been alone in expecting Sean Lynn’s side to end their World Cup campaign with a morale-boosting victory.
Although Wales’ Pool B fate had already been sealed by defeats to Scotland and Canada, Moore insisted ahead of kick off that “you definitely can’t say they’ve failed”. Those words sounded particularly hollow at full-time.
Fiji, fuelled by their own stirring motivation, blitzed Wales in a scintillating 20-minute first-half spell that threatened to take the game away from Lynn’s side. To their credit, Wales responded after the break, but the Fijiana held on to claim a famous 28-25 victory.
Three matches in England. Three defeats. In pure sporting terms, if that isn’t failure then what is?
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As Connor intimated in the bowels of Sandy Park’s West Stand on Friday evening, Wales now have a long time between drinks, to reflect and rebuild ahead of next year’s Women’s Six Nations.
Their ability to identify what went wrong on the pitch over the past fortnight while building on the foundations that have been laid off it will determine how quickly they are able to compete again.
Results have been well below par. Since Lynn was appointed at the start of the year, Wales have won only one of 10 competitive matches.
But this malaise cannot be pinned on the former Gloucester-Hartpury coach. He only had a week to work with the squad ahead of the start of the Six Nations in March and has at his disposal a group of contracted players he did not pick.
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Lynn has started the process of evolving the squad, bringing younger players into the ‘family’ – a phrase to describe the group that has accompanied the coach on his switch from Gloucester-Hartpury to the national job.
Wales’ World Cup squad included nine players who are 22 or younger and only five who are 30 or older. The likes of Branwen Metcalfe and Seren Lockwood will need time to find their feet at this level.
“We’re looking for the future,” Lynn said. “I’ve asked the players to be brave, but also we’ve been brave with our selection and giving opportunities to 18, 19-year-olds.
“Against Canada, we finished [with] four players who were 18 playing college rugby last year going against number two in the world.”
If there is one thing that Wales and Lynn can take from their World Cup campaign it’s that they appear to be building a culture that people – and those young players, especially – want to be a part of.
“It’s a really nice environment at this moment in time for people to come in, to feel accepted,” Georgia Evans, who quipped that she had been a part of the most and least successful Wales teams, said.
“We can dissect it all we like, but all we know is that our environment currently has been pretty special. The family feel to it and what Lynnie’s brought in, the coaching staff have been amazing.
“It’s about us as players now actually looking at ourselves, working with each other. We are competing against each other but it’s also making sure that those 15 that take the field, those 23, [are the] best combinations that we’ve got, and they are tight as a unit so that we can go out there and get the job done.”
England was Evans’ second World Cup and as one of the more senior players in the squad, the 28-year-old admitted she feels a responsibility to help those new to the environment.
“It’s now time to make sure that I leave the shirt in a better place and that is the training shirt, that is my playing shirt, everything that I wear, and embody in a Welsh shirt,” she added.
“Whatever I pass down next, if it’s some of my rubbish wisdom or my crappy bows that they want to have, it’s anything I can give to those girls to empower them to be the next generation, to be the next stars.”
That was a sentiment shared by Evans’ second-row colleague Gwen Crabb. “It’s been tough [but] it’s a strange one because I think the environment and the culture that we’re building at the minute is really, really important,” she said.
“You have to lay the foundations of something before you can start building. Sean Lynn’s been here for six months, Rome wasn’t built in a day, and I think the environment and the cultural is really going to sort of build us up now.”
Only time will tell whether the assessment of Evans and Crabb – or Moore even – proves prophetic or foolhardy. But as Lynn gathered his players for one final time at the 2025 World Cup, he was determined they acknowledge the silver linings encircling the clouds above Sandy Park.
“At the end of that game I said to the girls, we will stick together,” he said. “The character I’ve seen from that Six Nations Italy game (a 44-12 defeat in Parma in April) to where we are now, there is so much more promise.
“I promise you there will be a lot of belief going into Six Nations.”
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