Ever since a schoolboy picked up a football and ran with it in 1823, rugby has been male-dominated. It is traditionally - and stereotypically - played by big blokes with tree-trunk thighs, on cold winter days, when the air hangs heavy with the smell of blood, mud, sweat and embrocation.

It’s an intensely physical game. Scrums steam like cattle at a waterhole, horns locked, pawing the ground, waiting for the ball. Retrieved from its hindquarters, the ball is flung sideways, spinning along the three-quarters line. Players charge to buttress their team mates in ruck and maul. And when the two sides collide, it is with maximum impact. Rugby is a contact sport in the fullest sense of the word.

No game for the faint-hearted or fragile, then? A man’s game, some would say. But not only men play it. The first documented rugby match between English schoolgirls was played in secret in 1913, but in recent years the sport has really gained ground. The World Cup of women’s rugby is only 10 years old, yet already there are more than 200 clubs in England alone. It has strong educational roots - almost half the England squad are teachers, and the sport can trace its burgeoning popularity back to university teams formed in the 1980s.

Here, Oxford captain Olivia White is bursting through the Loughborough defence in the 1999 final of the British universities competition at Twickenham. Oxford, in the quartered shirts, won 10-0.

While Sport for All has become a slogan to boost participation, it is based on an aspiration rather than a statement of fact, because sport, like other social activities, is only just emerging from centuries of one-sided competition.

Women were banned from taking part in the original Olympic games, and in 776BC inaugurated their own, women-only, Hera games.

And when the modern Olympics began in 1896, its organiser, Pierre de Coubertin, promised to make it a “eulogy to male sport”. Four years later he relented slightly and let the “girls” (as elderly male commentators still love to call them) play golf and tennis.

In 1928, after several women collapsed at the end of an 800-metre race, the event was declared dangerous, and discontinued. The women’s marathon was not run at the Olympics until 1984. The Sydney Olympics in 2000 were the first in which men and women competed in an equal number of team games, but equestrianism is the only one in which men and women compete against each other.

Look at the determined grimace of the ball carrier, the face of her tackler, contorted by physical effort and the expectation of pain, and the concentration of her pursuers. They are playing the same game, with the same intensity and on the same pitch as their male counterparts.

In sport, it’s not who plays, but how you play, that matters. Teamwork, skill, fitness and determination will win more games than physical size. The essence of sport is competition on equal terms, with even sides, subject to the same rules, on that modern cliche for fair treatment, a level playing field. Anything else would be unsporting.

HARVEY McGAVIN

Links

Women’s rugby website: www.scrum.comwomenscolumns Top women in sport:www.distinguishedwomen.comsubjectsports.htm History of women’s sport: www.northnet.orgstlawrenceaauwsports.htm