England’s World Cup-winning captain Zoe Stratford has announced she is pregnant with her first child.<\/p>\n
Announcing the news on Instagram the 29-year-old said the baby is due in September.<\/p>\n
“We are so incredibly grateful and excited,” added Stratford.<\/p>\n
The news comes seven months after she led the Red Roses to a World Cup triumph on home soil.<\/p>\n
Stratford’s news will rule her out of the Women’s Six Nations, where England will open their campaign against Ireland at Allianz Stadium, Twickenham on Saturday, 11 April.<\/p>\n
England are yet to confirm who will lead the side in the 2026 campaign, but Marlie Packer and Meg Jones were vice-captains during the World Cup, with Alex Matthews taking the skipper’s armband for their pool match against Australia.<\/p>\n
Red Roses head coach John Mitchell will name his Six Nations squad on Friday.<\/p>\n
Stratford was named World Player of the Year in 2021 and has also co-captained her club Gloucester-Hartpury to three back-to-back Premiership Women’s Rugby titles.<\/p>\n
Since the World Cup success, she has also opened a coffee shop with England and Gloucester team-mate Natasha Hunt.<\/a><\/p>\n Stratford becomes the third England women’s player to announce they are expecting this year, following Bristol duo Lark Atkin-Davies<\/a> and Abbie Ward.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"England’s World Cup-winning captain Zoe Stratford has announced she is pregnant with her first child. Announcing the news…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":549252,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-549251","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549251","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=549251"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/549251\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/549252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=549251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=549251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=549251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}