Welsh Rugby Union gives 37 professional contracts to women players

But I am not so sure I'd be keen to rip up the rule book. While there is a way to go to have a sustainable game, the international game has a good competitive structure in the regional competitions and WXV1, and the English PWR league is growing rapidly. Both of those have been revised in the last couple of years with a view to having a model that can build to sustainable full professionalism within the next decade.

RWC2025 will be critical to that. The choice of venues has been selected to maximise the reach of who can attend, and the aim of selling out the Allianz (and setting a world record) for the Bronze & Final double header. They are off to a good start - apparently all 55,000 pre-sale tickets for the opening and closing games have already been sold.

Key for the global game (with so many international players playing pro rugby in England) is to use the build up and tournament to grow interest in the club game, and then follow through by encouraging people to come and watch the playuers they saw on the global stage.

WR and the RFU are very committed to making this work - not least because the women's pro game can leverage the infrastructure for the men's game, meaning it should be able to get to profitability much faster. Given the men's game is constrained in how far and fast it can grow by the number of games the players can play, that's critical to the success of the game as a whole.

Even after that point, if you look at how the Ferns scored their tries, they finished them through the backs, but by drawing the defenders in so that they had an undefended channel to attack out wide. It was clever rugby, but the clever bit was in not going wide until the defence had been forced into an alignment that left their extra player unmarked.

It will probably fade a little as we get a wider player pool and more players in full time training, but not so much that it will reach the level of the men's game in terms of power based games dominating.

All SA have is their drug cheating and their lottery cups. Not clear at all if these were legitiately won given the drug violations. Needed NZ to beat Ireland and needed a red card in the final. Then you proclaim yourselves the greatest team of all time!!

Our record is clean and excellent and no matter how much you juice up you wont beat us.

Given his injury record there is a very slim chance he will still be playing in NZ come World Cup time. He will be 33 and so banged up he will need q cortisol injection just to get out of bed in the morning. I can see him signing for someone like Pau, but only 5 appearances over 2 seasons because of injury before retiring.

There is no point in moving someone who is 27 to the wing, especially when NZ has a crazy production line of wingers.