Watch the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup live and on-demand via Stan Sport.<\/a><\/p>\nThe Waratahs wunderkind, aptly nicknamed \u2018Kid\u2019, \u00a0has been directly involved in more tries than any other player at this year\u2019s Rugby World Cup (seven) while also leading the competition.<\/p>\n
\u201cI grew up wanting to play on an international stage [like this],\u201d Halse told reporters.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI think\u00a0I’ve never played in front of so many people before and I think it’s meant to be an almost\u00a0sold out crowd of like 30,000 people [this week against England] so I think just trying to feed off the crowd’s\u00a0energy and get myself pumped up for that game<\/p>\n
To put in perspective what Halse has done, when co-captain Emily Chancellor was 18, Rugby wasn\u2019t even a fever dream, let alone producing what teammate Halse has at this Rugby World Cup.<\/p>\n
The flanker was still three years away from playing her first game of Rugby, first picking up the ball when she at Uni.<\/p>\n
\u201cI’ve loved\u00a0watching the way she’s grown over the last three years at Waratahs from a kid with a\u00a0hell of a lot of talent but not a lot of self-belief, move into a player who is backing herself,\u00a0executing and enjoying it,\u201d the flanker explained.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe confidence that she’s got over the last two years playing in the gold jersey\u00a0is just unreal to see the way she truly believes in what she’s doing.\u00a0 She’s got the good communication, she’s got a great skill set, but she’s also a really natural footy player.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI remember watching her last year at Waratahs, she’d seen a banana kick that one of\u00a0the boys had done in Super Rugby and she just picked up the ball at training and was\u00a0just practising it like for five minutes before the session had happened and then in\u00a0the session she just pulled out this epic end over end ball that swung\u00a0off the field.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere’s no fear of failure there, there’s this\u00a0natural ability which I wish I had and\u00a0wish I was born 20 years later and had\u00a0the ability that she does because she is a raw talent that is also honing in\u00a0on the skill and picking the moments to throw those long passes to carry or to kick it in\u00a0behind and find those 50-22s.\u201d<\/p>\n
Halse credits her teammates for guiding her through the process and keeping her grounded as the spotlight and waves of attention start to pour in for the teenager.<\/p>\n
\u201cI try not to think about the pressure of the game too much, I just try and go out\u00a0the field and do what I do, but I think a couple of girls in the group like to keep\u00a0me humble, such as Maya [Stewart] and \u2018Freddie\u2019 [Georgina Friedrichs],\u201d she said and smiled.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey’ve been there since the start. I think we played together for about three years\u00a0so I think they’ve both taken me under their wing, definitely on and off the field.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I think they’ve worked a lot with me around my professionalism and then the mental side\u00a0of the game off and on the field, just queuing me up on some skills and more like around the queues on the field, like when to throw certain passes and reading defensive queues.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fullback is always looking to get better and improve her craft as she slowly rises up the ranks as one of the best in the world, with All Blacks great Christan Cullen an idol – even if he retired a year after she was born.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think I’ve still got a lot to work on, I would probably say speed work, and then I know my kicking can still get better. It’s good but\u00a0I think there’s always things that I can improve on, whether it’s my follow through or the\u00a0technique in which I kick the ball,\u201d Halse added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wallaroos breakout star Caitlyn Halse is taking in her remarkable start to World Cup life as the fullback…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":114057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85,19259],"class_list":["post-114056","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports","tag-wallaroos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114056","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114056"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114056\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/114057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114056"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114056"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114056"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}