{"id":377688,"date":"2025-12-29T07:21:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-29T07:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/377688\/"},"modified":"2025-12-29T07:21:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-29T07:21:07","slug":"welsh-rugby-a-year-to-remember-and-a-year-to-forget-for-wales-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/377688\/","title":{"rendered":"Welsh rugby: A year to remember and a year to forget for Wales women"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">You have to dig deep to find some positives in Wales&#8217; season, but once you get beyond the layer of disappointing results, there are some green shoots of hope.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Nel Metcalfe, Carys Cox and Kayleigh Powell were standout performers and gave Wales&#8217; stale backline some much-needed spark.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Lynn also exposed a new generation to Test rugby &#8211; Maisie Davies, Katherine Baverstock, Branwen Metcalfe and Tilly Vucaj all made their debuts this year.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Meanwhile, former Wales captain Siwan Lillicrap, now managing the WRU&#8217;s women&#8217;s performance pathway, says there is plenty of exciting age-grade talent coming through, talent we can expect to see in this season\u2019s Celtic Challenge.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">WRU plans to shake-up the women&#8217;s game are also cause for optimism.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">As well as extra funding for Celtic Challenge sides Brython Thunder and Gwalia Lightning, there will be a new four-club league, a national academy and player development centres as part of its restructure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"You have to dig deep to find some positives in Wales&#8217; season, but once you get beyond the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":377689,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-377688","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-rugby","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-rugby","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377688","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=377688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377688\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/377689"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}