by The Welsh Rugby Union says it “must apologise” for threats to withdraw the women’s team from the competition, but the organization denies its actions were sexist.
The allegations, reported by the Telegraph, say the women’s team was threatened with withdrawal from next year’s Rugby World Cup if they did not sign new contracts. The report also claimed that WRU chief executive Abi Tierney did not want to pay the team’s travel costs. The governing body denies some of the allegations.
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WRU president Richard Collier-Keywood said a players’ representation group contacted him on August 8 to raise concerns about the way contract negotiations were being conducted. This led him to ask WRU board members Claire Donovan and Alison Thorne to carry out a review of the process.
This study, which will be made public in the coming weeks, has already revealed that players were told that if they did not sign new professional gaming contracts within three hours, they would be removed from competition.
The threat of withdrawal came after the management team became aware that continued contract negotiations may have affected preparations for a friendly against Scotland on September 6, as players were considering strike action.
“We intend to sit down properly with the players over the coming weeks and apologize,” Collier-Keywood said. “It’s absolutely clear that we need to apologise, we just need to sort out the logistics because the players are in all parts of the country.” But Collier-Keywood insisted it wasn’t sexist: “We basically discussed this with women and the word just didn’t come up.” I know people want to use labels, but they’re probably unnecessary labels because they’re not representative.
“The reason this happened was not related to sexism towards the players. It was a complex ecosystem of things gone wrong. [for] for which we are responsible. It is important for us as a board to know exactly what went wrong and not just accept labels because otherwise we will take the wrong actions in response to those labels.
Donovan agreed with Collier-Keywood that sexism played no role: “There are all kinds of things that we absolutely could have done better and there are all kinds of hurts that we need to talk about, but I sincerely do not believe in the decisions that were made. were made were motivated by sexism,” she said.
“There was a real determination to improve things for the Welsh women’s team going forward and we may have gotten lost in some conversations, but the desire was there to improve things from the start.”
