No-one in the England squad has more World Cup experience than Emily Scarratt.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old centre, lining up for her fifth campaign, is the only survivor from the last time the tournament was in England.<\/p>\n
“A home World Cup is massive,” she said earlier this month.<\/p>\n
“I was part of the 2010 one. Times were very different then, but it was a small taste of what a home World Cup can be like.”<\/p>\n
Back then, the pool stages were all staged at Surrey Sports Park. The final was staged at The Stoop, Harlequins’ home ground.<\/p>\n
“At the time it was unbelievable,” added Scarratt. “We had increased media attention, increased everything. The country got behind us and we had never seen crowds like it.<\/p>\n
“I will never forget getting off the bus for the World Cup final in 2010 and hearing the crowd. It was probably the first time that we had a crowd that was big enough to hear.<\/p>\n
“I remember the bus door opened and we all just looked around at each other and said ‘this is actually mega’.”<\/p>\n
The crowd for that 13-10 defeat by New Zealand was 13,253, a record for a women’s match at the time.<\/p>\n
As Scarratt says: Fifteen years on, times are different.<\/p>\n
Surrey Sports Park is now where Harlequins’ women’s side train, rather than where international tournaments are played.<\/p>\n
The Stoop’s main role on World Cup final day this time will be for car parking and hospitality as 82,000 people flood across the Chertsey Road to Twickenham.<\/p>\n
When England step off the bus outside the Stadium of Light on Friday, they will hear the volume of love and expectation around them. They will get a taste long before the doors open.<\/p>\n
“I don’t think any of us will understand how supported we will be until we get going,” said Scarratt.<\/p>\n
The game has changed. Now it is up to England to change the World Cup’s usual gut-punch ending.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"No-one in the England squad has more World Cup experience than Emily Scarratt. The 35-year-old centre, lining up…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":87251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-87250","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\/87250","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=87250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/87251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}