Netherlands v Sweden: How the second-oldest rivalry in women’s Test rugby started

Away from the glare of the Men’s Six Nations, Amsterdam’s National Rugby Centre will play host to the second-oldest rivalry in women’s Tests on Saturday as the Netherlands get the Rugby Europe Women’s Championship 2024 underway against Sweden.

The focus of the players involved is sure to be on the task at hand, a potentially crucial match in the context of both the Championship and their future development.

But whether they are conscious of it or not, when they emerge from the changing rooms and run onto the pitch ahead of kick-off in Amsterdam, the players will be following in footsteps first laid down almost four decades ago.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the inaugural meeting between the teams, the Netherlands travelling to Malmö where they beat Sweden 34-0 on 21 October 1984. At that time only three previous official women’s Test matches had been staged, all between the Dutch and France.

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It is perhaps understandable the Netherlands were open to finding alternative opposition given they had lost all three – albeit by an aggregate score of only 17-0 – but the reason they found themselves on a coach to Malmö owes as much to the way in which the women’s game evolved in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Much of the impetus of that growth was provided by club tours. At first that primarily involved squads from the USA heading to Europe – and New Zealand – but as the number of clubs on the continent grew so did interest in competition from rivals closer to home.

These tours opened up lines of communication while the teams carried information with them as they travelled on to play their next opponents.

It is how the relationships were forged that led to the Netherlands hosting France in the first-ever women’s Test, in June 1982, and would be crucial on the road to the inaugural Women’s Rugby World Cup nine years later.

In the same year that France beat the Dutch in Utrecht, a touring team from Malmö arrived in the Netherlands and it seems that trip at least helped to pave the way for an international between the nations.

“Because the contact was so good and we were looking for more internationals, then we organised an international,” Dominique Danton, who coached the Netherlands between 1983 and 1992, tells RugbyPass. “Because the coaches of Malmö were also involved with the Swedish Rugby Union.”

Danton himself is a living example of how rugby’s touring culture helped to shape the development of the women’s game.

Born in Morocco, into a French military family, Danton moved around as a child, first playing rugby league in Marseille before a relocation north to Paris brought him into contact with the 15-a-side game.

In 1976, when Danton was 20, a team from the Dutch city of Wageningen visited his club and he enjoyed their company so much that he jumped at the chance to take part in the return trip as a coach two years later.

On his way home from that tour, he convinced a friend to return to Wageningen on holiday. His companion lasted three weeks in the Netherlands, but Danton stayed on, finding work first at a factory and then as a cinema projectionist to help fund his rugby endeavours.

Danton also had some experience of coaching female players in Paris and after lending a hand to those early matches against France as a “liaison”, largely because he spoke French, he was more formally involved in the set-up by 1984, listed as coach alongside Bert Bode for the match against Sweden.

His involvement made sense given the large contingent of players, six in the 24-player squad for Malmö, from Wageningen, a club that had first fielded a women’s team in a charity match in 1975 and benefited from a large local student population.

Two players who picked up an oval ball after moving to the city to study were half-back partners, Tonny van de Boom and Sylvia Mecking.

“You have these mentor groups who show you around town,” Van de Boom recalls from her early days at Wageningen University in 1979. “There was this one guy who played rugby and he persuaded me to also come and participate in a training for the ladies’ team.

“Well, I was instantly convinced this is what I would like to do.”

Three years later, Van de Boom was joined at the club by Mecking. “I bumped into somebody who already played there, and they said, ‘You have to join’,” she says.

“I went there and after one training I was completely into the rugby!”

Mecking was fast-tracked into the national team, making her debut against France only a year after that first introduction to the game, while Van de Boom joined her in the line-up for a 3-0 defeat to the same opposition in May, 1984.

Both players retained their places for the match against Sweden and boarded the long coach journey to Malmö. Van de Boom had prepared for the trip by enrolling in Swedish language classes – in an attempt to gain an advantage on the pitch – and taping ABBA records she had borrowed from the library.

The journey from Wageningen afforded plenty of time for a singalong. Four decades ago, the tunnels and bridges that now link Germany, Denmark and Sweden had yet to materialise and Danton estimates the team’s voyage via road and ferry took up to 18 hours.

By the time the team reached its destination, there was little opportunity to do anything other than rest for the match the following day.

Details of the match itself are vague. However, one of the few newspaper reports it generated back in the Netherlands, carried by the Rotterdam daily Algemeen Dagblad (AD), stated that “a strong wind blew lengthwise on the field, clearly influencing the game”.

“Kicking was not very effective, resulting in the few hundred spectators enjoying an attractive and open game,” the article continues. “Both in the forwards and the backs, the Dutch team excelled throughout the entire match.”

Many of the reports erroneously state that full-back Liesbeth Mey top-scored with 12 points. This appears to be the result of a miscommunication about how much her three conversions were worth to the 34-0 victory.

It is a fact that still rankles, albeit jokingly, with Van de Boom who notched two of her side’s seven tries. “I think I was the one who made the most points,” she says, laughing. “I wasn’t mentioned in the paper though because our team manager, she couldn’t calculate!”

Something that wasn’t in doubt, however, was the superiority of the Dutch on the day. “Sweden were no match for Danton’s team,” an article in regional outlet De Twentsche Courant Tubantia proclaimed, while AD admitted the scoreline left “nothing to the imagination”.

Following the run of narrow defeats to France, the Dutch players were eager to celebrate their maiden Test victory. However, the location of the match, around 600km south-east of Stockholm, and the fact it was played on a Sunday meant most of the home squad needed to make a hasty getaway at the final whistle.

Undeterred, the Netherlands squad was grateful to the hospitality of a local football team. “We had our third half in the canteen of a ladies’ soccer club,” Van de Boom explains. “But we had a lovely third half! It was a pity they couldn’t join in.”

Sweden would make the trip to the Netherlands in each of the next two years, losing 19-0 and 11-6 but the latter proved their last meeting for 12 years before they met at the National Rugby Centre during the 1998 Women’s Rugby World Cup.

By that time, Van de Boom and Mecking – who both spent time working abroad – as well as their coach, Danton had stepped away from the international game.

Sweden beat the Netherlands in successive Tests in 2001 and 2002, and again in 2012, but for the large parts their rivalry has played out in much the same way as it started 40 years ago. Last season’s 38-12 Women’s Championship victory was the 14th Dutch win in 17 matches between the nations.

“I don’t see myself as a pioneer because it was already there for five years [when she joined Wageningen],” Van de Boom says, reflecting on her time as a player. “I’m not the pioneer, it’s the girls from the first batch – they are pioneers.

“But we as a team, we were pioneers.”

Thanks to Brigette Johnston for assistance in researching this article.