Hunt & Scarratt in England’s Rugby World Cup squad

Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025

Dates: 22 August – 27 September 2018 Host country: England

Three years after her unexpected absence from England’s team that finished runners-up in 2022, scrum-half Natasha Hunt has been named in the rugby world cup squad.

Centre Emily Scarratt, who will be the first English rugby union player to play at five World Cups, is also named in head coach John Mitchell’s 32-player squad for the home competition.

Scarratt, 35, was first a player to win a World Cup in 2010 and was a star in England’s 2014 triumphant defeat to Canada.

The Red Roses will be led by Zoe Aldcroft, who succeeded Marlie Packer as captain in January before sailing to a Women’s Six Nations Grand Slam.

Their other Pool A games include those against Australia and Samoa (August 30, Brighton, and September 6, Brighton).

On Saturday, September 27, the final will take place in Twickenham.

England only narrowly missed New Zealand’s most recent World Cup final in Auckland in November 2022, but they have won all 25 games since that defeat.

BBC Sport at Twickenham Alastair Telfer

Mitchell identified as an area to improve by creating two teams that can challenge for a World Cup, and he has succeeded in doing so while still extending his winning streak of 25 matches since that humiliating World Cup final defeat.

The depth of England’s women’s basketball team is unparalleled, as evidenced by this year’s Six Nations, which saw 34 players play for a fourth consecutive Grand Slam and win a seventh straight title.

Packer and Scarratt, who won the 2014 World Cup, have a combined 228 caps, which underlines Mitchell’s depth.

Ellie Kildunne, the women’s player of the year at World Rugby, was also sidelined for the one-point victory over Les Bleues, with Mitchell not rushing his team’s biggest game of the season to recover from injury.

Although injuries occur frequently at major tournaments, England are in a unique position because they have rely on replacement players who can play for the majority of the tournament’s starting teams.

In a subsequent interview with The Rugby Journal, Hunt detailed her struggles with her non-selection, saying that she was “trying to shut out” the tournament “as if it wasn’t even happening.”

She returned to England a year later, and she will win her third World Cup with an additional 80 international caps.

The two specialist scrum-halves in the squad are Lucy Packer, 36, and Hunt, 36; however, Exeter’s Claudia Moloney-MacDonald can also play that position.

Hunt has played a significant role in the Gloucester-Hartpury team, which has won three Premiership Women’s Rugby titles in a row.

In addition to the England squad, Jade Shekells, center of Gloucester-Hartpury, and Trailfinders’ Abi Burton, both make their World Cup debuts.

Burton’s rise to the Red Roses lineup has been remarkable. She spent more than three weeks in a coma after being diagnosed with autoimmune encephalitis, which occurs when the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the brain in 2022.

After making a full recovery, she and Shekells made their England XV-a-side debuts during the Six Nations, along with Shekells, at the previous year’s Olympic in Paris.

Mitchell once said, “The selection process is never simple. We think this squad has the potential to win the World Cup after a thorough two-year selection process.