A quarter century of women's international rugby

Here's an anniversary that has passed the sporting world by last week (and my apologies for missing it myself).

Last Wednesday (13th June) was the 25th anniversary of the first ever women's rugby international, which took place between the Netherlands and France at Utrecht in 1982, France winning 4-0 (tries were only worth four points in those days).

The lack of celebrations, dancing in the streets, postage stamps, etc. to mark this important event is understandable perhaps as apparently the players at the time did not realise that they were making history, and the actual match itself came close to being forgotten as a result of the French RFU's take over of the women's game in 1990. In their otherwise comprehensive database of matches and results by their women's team they chose to disregard all of the internationals played up to that point.

What is more there is no complete listing of women's internationals available anywhere to compensate - even the IRB's records do not go back before 2006! Some RFUs have listings of their games (most don't) - even England's only goes back to the mid 90s (despite their first international being nearly ten years before).

However, the status of the game was rescued from obscurity by the Rugby Museum at Twickenham organised last summer an exhibition on the history of the women's game which unearthed this fact (and many more). Though that exhibition is now long over, the good news is that much of it is still available online (click here) - and fascinating it is too. In fact much of it could easily be reused by any club that wanted to organise an exhibition about the women's game.