International Women's Day 2020: Former Red Roses skipper Catherine Spencer on the struggles of managing defeats and falling short
Sunday 8 March 2020 14:15, UK
Former England Women captain Catherine Spencer chats exclusively to Sky Sports about her quest to win a Rugby World Cup, and the struggles of not achieving it.
Speaking as a guest on this week's Will Greenwood Podcast, Spencer - who won 63 caps for England between 2004 and 2011, and captained her country from 2007 - opened up about her emotional story and newly-released autobiography Mud, Maul, Mascara.
The 40-year-old divulged how fighting for a dream can make and break you, and in her case how two Rugby World Cup final losses in 2006 and 2010 - the latter at the Twickenham Stoop - were incredibly hard to deal with.
"[The book] is an honest portrayal of my emotions around my rugby journey and specifically my quest to win the Rugby World Cup. Getting close on one occasion, very close on a second occasion and not quite getting there," she said.
"It's quite brutal in a way. The beginning of the book is quite hard to read, and it was hard to write. It does open up the emotional toil of trying to achieve a dream, which for me was trying to win a Rugby World Cup.
"It was really difficult. To put things into context, we'd lost in 2006 but we had a really good four years in between the two World Cups. We'd beaten New Zealand in 2009 at Twickenham, which was a fantastic day for the team and really spurred us on towards the World Cup in 2010.
"We probably had that favourites tag and it was a home World Cup with the final at the Twickenham Stoop, and we were up against New Zealand in that final at a sell-out stadium. All expectation was on us and the media profile was really growing, noticeably.
"As a player and captain in the middle of all that, there was a huge amount of pressure, though probably the majority of that came from ourselves.
"We were going to win this World Cup. We were good enough to win it and that's exactly what we were going to do, it's what we'd been working for during the previous four-year World Cup cycle, and before the last World Cup too.
"Many of us had been playing for years to get to this position, so it was a huge thing. There was really no other option. Go out and win.
"On the day, the atmosphere was electric and I'd not experienced anything like it. The overwhelming wave of support from people around us was phenomenal, it really was.
"We go into the game and it was really tight. We were 10-10 for a while, and I actually spent the last 10 minutes on the bench as I'd been subbed off, which I found really hard at the end.
"I was helpless, I couldn't do anything and the Black Ferns scored a penalty and they won 13-10. It was something we hadn't actually prepared for. I hadn't prepared for it as an individual or captain.
"And suddenly I had to change our focus. We still had the opportunity to promote our game, promote our sport. I needed to kind of uphold us as athletes and female sportspeople.
"That became a sort of second job really, but behind that I had all these emotions and the absolute devastation that we'd just lost, and not really knowing how to deal with that on the day - and then in the days and weeks following that.
"That World Cup journey and the emotion behind losing was really, really difficult to manage."
Four years on from that narrow World Cup final defeat, Spencer was in a studio post-retirement for Sky Sports taking in the 2014 Rugby World Cup final, as the Red Roses beat Canada in Paris to become world champions.
The No 8 was crying in the studio at the time but admits now they were not necessarily tears of joy that the viewer might have thought they were.
"They weren't. Some were in the sense that Sophie Hemming and Maggie Alphonsi, my best mates out there playing and they've just won a World Cup. For Gary Street, Graham Smith, fantastic.
"But overwhelmingly really, these emotions started flooding out that it hadn't happened four years ago. And we should have done, it should have happened. I was devastated for myself that it didn't.
"And I had all these emotions that I didn't necessarily want to feel, but didn't have control over. It was a good job it was on Sky, because we went for an ad break! I could compose myself a little bit and patch-up my mascara!
"It was difficult. I enjoy doing work in a studio for myself, but I was also so aware that I was still a former England captain, and of the job to be an ambassador for our sport. That's what I needed to do at that time in the studio.
"I had to cover up my emotions and I had to do that a lot of times. And it's only now, 10 years on, that I feel in a position to be able to be so honest about my thoughts.
"I've spoken to some of my team-mates, like Sophie Hemming recently, who was one of the World Cup winners in 2014, and we were really close, and she said: 'I didn't know, I should have known', and I told her that I didn't want to talk to any of my team-mates who had won in 2014, because I didn't want to take anything away from them.
"What an amazing achievement. I didn't want to tell them how I was feeling."
If the 2014 final victory was a breakthrough moment, it was 2010 which felt like the day women's rugby was put on the map though.
That tournament and the huge crowd for the final all added up to the fact something had changed. The way women's rugby was perceived, branded, covered.
Despite it being a day of immense personal disappointment therefore, can Spencer look back on it now as having been part of something with a long-term importance?
"I remember after the final in the bar area and two guys came up to me and said: 'If you'd told us four or five weeks ago that we would actually pay for a ticket to come and watch women's rugby, we would not have believed you.'
"And it was a direct result of the coverage, of the televised matches. Media coverage had made them go and pay money to watch a women's match, and that epitomised it in a way.
"People did start to follow us and they didn't have to seek out or hunt for coverage because it was starting to become a bit more apparent for anyone in the general rugby audience and environment.
"Women's rugby started to come onto the map and it was really significant for us around 2009 and 2010 onwards.
"The coverage from Sky - and I'm not just saying this because I'm talking to you - but it was really, really important for us."
