England's invincible Red Roses: The 38-game unbeaten run and a team 'pushing for perfection'

Claudia Moloney-MacDonald leaps onto England hooker Amy Cokayne after she scored a try against France Gaizka Iroz / AFP via Getty Images Share articleAsk members of England Women’s rugby union team what their current winning streak is and not all of them will be able to tell you. Perhaps it’s easy to lose count when on an unbeaten run that stretches back to 2022. In the past seven years, the team has lost once, a painful 34-31 Women’s Rugby World Cup final defeat by New Zealand in the dying minutes of a closely fought encounter that ended a then-record 30-game winning run. The current streak? A remarkable 38 matches. On Sunday, the Red Roses, as they are also known, prevailed 43-28 in Bordeaux against France to secure an eighth successive Women’s Six Nations title and a fifth-straight Grand Slam (awarded to a team which wins all five championship matches), all without many of the players who won the Rugby World Cup last year. “People always say: ‘Oh, you’ve got this winning streak!’ We never really mention it as a group, which is a bit crazy, I guess,” skipper Meg Jones told The Athletic in the build-up to the France match. In recent matches, the Red Roses have not been perfect. It is clear to see from France’s performances in recent years — as well as on Sunday — that they have narrowed the gap a little. England had to thwart a second-half comeback after initially going 29-7 ahead. Against Italy in their penultimate Six Nations match, the Red Roses scored 61 points but, on the flip side, conceded 33. But that a team which has so many of its usual squad members unavailable — four are pregnant and a number have suffered tournament-ending injuries — continues to be invincible is one of the great achievements in sports. This is the creation of a dynasty, and the embodiment of the importance of investment. “As fierce as we are on the pitch, we 100 percent want to show to everyone that if you invest in women, they can perform,” England prop Sarah Bern, who has lost just three games in her 10-year international career, told The Athletic before her try-scoring performance on Sunday. “They just need equal opportunity, equal access, equal funding. There’s still challenges that every women’s sport faces to close all of those gaps and we’re thankful for the Rugby Football Union (the sport’s governing body in England) supporting us so far and being the forefront and leading of that.” There is no doubt England have benefited from introducing full-time professional contracts in 2019. It has been widely reported that the RFU invested £15 million into the women’s game in 2024 and, in setting its aim to win back-to-back Rugby World Cups, the governing body wants to double revenue to £60m by 2030. By comparison, last year’s Rugby World Cup finalists Canada had to crowdfund to take part in the tournament. England’s women are widely regarded as the best-paid women’s rugby union team on the planet but they perform like the world’s best, too. “I guarantee you the one thing about this team is if they lose once, they definitely won’t be losing twice,” Bern added. “There’s always room to grow, there’s always room to get better. “The success of this team, the dominance of this team and this environment — there’s no ceiling to it. It can go on. We can push it. We could be the best sporting team in the world. That’s what we strive for. We are pushing for perfection, even though we know we’ll never attain it. “That’s probably why the girls couldn’t tell you what the winning streak is because we truly do focus on every single detail of the process in this team. That is driven by the coaches, it’s driven by Mitch (head coach John Mitchell), it is driven by the players who have been here for years and have probably felt the heartbreak of those big games that we missed out on because of slight, tiny errors in detail. That’s why we’re so detail driven now and then with that there’s a lot of heart and passion to play.” Ruby Tui was in the New Zealand team that beat England in the 2022 Rugby World Cup final, describing it as the best moment of a playing career that also included an Olympic gold medal and a Rugby Sevens World Cup win. “It’s funny because that Black Ferns team, we weren’t actually concerned about England’s winning record or all the rest of it. We were just focused inward,” she said, before describing the Red Roses’ current record as “systematic dominance.” “It’s a bit undeniable how impressive it is really,” Tui said. “I think I counted 12 players out of a named 23-player roster, there are 12 of them that are either pregnant or injured and they’re still doing the things they’re doing, so how can you not appreciate how impressive that is? “You’ve got to have a good, sound coaching team with tactical and technical knowledge to help the best players in the world get better. You become like a gold miner, you’re trying to find the one percent somewhere in this amazing player’s game to make them better. You can always find it if you look in the right places, but you need a good management team supplementing those players. “Then you need good systems, you need standards to be high all over the park, which sounds easy, but it’s not. And then the next generation of players need to follow those same standards. You’ve got to have some sort of in-house competition. That’s world-class rugby every week. That’s why 12 players missing from the squad is quite incredible.” Arguably, there is no current sports team which is as dominant as the Red Roses, their winning streak by far is the longest in the history of men’s or women’s rugby union. “We love being the standard bearers of consistency,” head coach Mitchell said before the game. “And with that, we’re saying come and get us, and somebody’s going to get us. We understand that reality and we shouldn’t be disgraced if somebody does get us. It’s becoming exponential in that sense. That little bit of edge drives us but we don’t want to give that up easily. “Anyone can pick on our weaknesses, but ultimately we’ll look to fix them. But that doesn’t mean we’re in decline. We’re actually developing and evolving. And maybe we’re evolving a lot quicker than a lot of people realise.” But what happens if a team does finally beat them? Next to try will be New Zealand, ranked second in the world rankings, in the inaugural WXV Global Series. “The sun will rise,” Meg Jones, England’s captain, said on Thursday. “We’d be the same people, the same friends,” Mitchell added. Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms