The Welsh Rugby Union (WRU) has acknowledged that it "needs to apologise" for threats to withdraw the women’s team from competition, but the organization firmly denies that any sexist motivations were behind its actions. These allegations were first reported by the Telegraph, which claimed that 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 suggested that WRU’s CEO, Abi Tierney, was reluctant to cover travel expenses for the team. The governing body, however, refutes some of these claims.

WRU chair, Richard Collier-Keywood, revealed that a player representation group approached him on August 8th with concerns about the handling of contract negotiations. This prompted him to request Claire Donovan and Alison Thorne, two WRU board members, to conduct a review into the process. The review, which is expected to be made public in the coming weeks, has already uncovered that players were given a three-hour ultimatum to sign new professional playing contracts or face withdrawal from competition.

The threat of withdrawal arose after the executive leadership team realized that ongoing contract negotiations might disrupt preparations for a friendly match against Scotland on September 6th, as players were contemplating strike action. "It is our intention to sit down properly with the players over the next couple of weeks and deliver the apology," Collier-Keywood stated. "It is absolutely clear we do need to apologise; we just need to get the logistics of that right because players are scattered across the country."

Collier-Keywood was adamant that the issue was not driven by sexism: "We basically discussed this with the women, and that word just did not come up. I understand people want to use labels, but it is probably an unhelpful label because that is not representative. The reason for that happening was not due to sexism towards the players; it was due to a complex ecosystem of things that had gone wrong for which we are responsible. It is crucial for us as a board to know exactly what went wrong and not to just accept labels, as otherwise, we might take out the wrong actions in response to those labels."

Claire Donovan concurred with Collier-Keywood, asserting that sexism did not play a role: "There are numerous aspects we could have handled better, and there is a lot of hurt that we need to address, but I genuinely do not believe the decisions made were driven by sexism. There was a genuine determination to improve things for the Welsh women’s team moving forward, and we may have strayed from our path in some of the conversations, but the desire to make it better was always there from the start."

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