It was a start to remember for the UK Armed Forces at the 2025 International Defence Rugby Competition.<\/p>\n
They scored 17 tries in a mauling of Tonga to go top of Pool A, with Daisy Aspinall scoring five times during the match, but how did UKAF dominate so convincingly?<\/p>\n
Former RAF, UKAF and Harlequins head coach John Wilding and ex-UKAF and Army stalwart Erica Mills gave their thoughts.<\/p>\n
John Wilding<\/p>\n
A really great game for UKAF. A good start to the tournament and played a lot of exciting rugby.<\/p>\n
Lots of variation in attack and some really good finishing out wide. Some good set-pieces but some work in terms of tackling and defence for me.<\/p>\n
I think Tonga will be better for the game. They’ll have something to work and certainly around attack and defence and how they can speed that up.<\/p>\n
UKAF definitely will know that there’s sterner tests to come in terms of strategy and tactics.<\/p>\n
Erica Mills<\/p>\n
I think we didn’t play conventional rugby which we had been guilty of playing in the past. I think we showed a bit more expansive rugby and that was great to see from a UKAF perspective.<\/p>\n
From a Tongan perspective, we saw heart like all the way through the game. They spent a lot of the 80 minutes defending, which is never easy when you are on a team that is playing such a versatile team in attack with a lot of pace out wide.<\/p>\n
For them, it’s about going away now and working on the basics of both their attack and defence. Trying to take some positives out of the defensive effort that they showed today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was a start to remember for the UK Armed Forces at the 2025 International Defence Rugby Competition.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76994,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-76993","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\/76993","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=76993"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76993\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76994"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76993"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76993"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76993"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}