The women’s rugby league season is hurtling towards its climax with everything still up for grabs, from the Super League title to promotion and relegation.
FOR FANS of women’s rugby league there is certainly no shortage of action to enjoy as the season comes to an exciting end.
While all eyes might be on Super League and whether or not York can defend their title and prevent St Helens from completing a second treble in four seasons, there is also a lot to decide below the top flight.
With a place in next year’s Super League up for grabs the prize on offer is huge for those teams teams aspiring to join those at the top.
An expanded eight-team Super League this year saw a new community structure take shape directly below it, with Northern and Southern Championships the next step down, before further league and regional splits at the base of the new pyramid.
London Broncos have already taken the Southern Championship crown, beating Cardiff Demons 28-8 (see overleaf) and will now face the eventual winners of the Northern Championship to become the National Champions.
Whoever wins that National Championship game will then go on to face Featherstone Rovers, who finished bottom of Super League, in the Promotion play-off final to earn a spot to play alongside St Helens, Leeds, York, Wigan, Barrow, Huddersfield and Warrington in 2025.
Having come close to promotion last season Leigh Leopards will undoubtedly be favourites to progress right through to that showdown with Featherstone.
Having gone through the league season undefeated and scoring an average of just over 50 points a game, they were then handed passage straight through to the Northern Championship Final when fourth-placed Oulton Raidettes were unable to raise a team due to several players missing through injury and unavailability.
There they will face Sheffield Eagles who beat Salford Red Devils in the other semi-final. The winner will them meet London Broncos, and then potentially Rovers.
Featherstone have found the going tough since their automatic promotion from Super League Group Two last time out, failing to win a single game and scoring just 128 points across 14 games.
That game to determine Super League’s eighth club will take place as the first game of a double header alongside the Grand Final on Sunday, 6th October at the home of whichever of the Super League finalists finished highest in the league.
Having already clinched the League Leaders’ Shield, St Helens will be overwhelming favourites to feature in the final, with their table-topping position meaning the game will be played there. But with Leeds, York and Wigan all closer than ever before, who will join them
With both semi-finals too close to call, just about the only certainty going into the play-offs is that York Valkyrie will not be giving up their title without a fight.
Lindsay Anfield’s side took the crown with a 16-6 win last year, but multiple long-term injuries and unavailabilities have somewhat hampered the defence of their title with both their previous Woman of Steel winners unable to have any real impact on the side.
2022 winner Tara Jane Stanley has been in and out of the side with injury all year and saw her season end early with an ACL issue, while 2023 winner Sinead Peach was unavailable due to her pregnancy.
But while she may have faced some disruption to her squad, Anfield has seen the benefits of having the next generation of Super League stars handed an opportunity they may otherwise not have got.
“I’d be lying if I said this season hadn’t been a struggle for us all,” said Anfield, whose side has lost three times in 2024 having tasted defeat just once in the previous two seasons.
“It’s been tough, but we’ve all just had to be flexible and adapt to anything we have faced.
“I worked out that there have only been three or four of our players that haven’t had to switch positions at some point throughout the season.
“But hopefully, when we get to the end of the season and look back, we can learn a lot from what we’ve faced.
“It was always going to be hard when we lost Sinead at the start of the season and we had seen Grace Field join Leeds, Amy Staveley left and Elisa Akpa couldn’t get another year here because of visa issues, so that was a big part of the Grand Final winning team we couldn’t call on.
“But saying that, we’ve done really well with our own under-19s players coming through and the players we’ve had through our partnership with Sheffield Eagles.
“Those girls have taken their chances well, and had we not been in this position they probably wouldn’t have got their opportunities in the side because we did have a strong squad. But Izzy Brennan, Evie Sexton and Lauren Exley have come out of nowhere this year but will now be featuring in the play-offs.
“Lisa Parker as well has spent the best part of the second half of the season starting for us after beginning the year preparing for a season with Sheffield, and that shows that these partnerships with Championship clubs can work.
“So it has been tough, but we have learnt a lot from having to be adaptable and playing the hand that we’re dealt.
“The fact that we were going into the play-offs in this position shows how well we have adapted. Sometimes when we were been beating ourselves up that we’ve not had as good a season as we did last year, we just looked at the fact that we were still up there.
“With the squads we’ve been able to put out, we’ve still done a really professional job, so I couldn’t be happier with them.
“Although, at the beginning of the season there was maybe an air of complacency around us just because of the way we’ve played, and what we’ve achieved in the past couple of seasons. We’d finally won a title and some of the girls were able to think about other things.
“You could almost see what was going to happen so it was actually a good thing when we got turned over by Wigan because it flicked a switch in us and we started getting back into our old mentality of ruthlessness.
“We still have that mentality and we’re ready to turn anyone over. But the top four is still so close so literally anyone could win it.”
First published in Rugby League World magazine, Issue 501 (October 2024)
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