The air conditioning is off at England’s Pennyhill Park training base, rather an inconvenience in the continuing summer swelter, but it is with a typically ebullient smile that Sarah Bern sits down, the prop enjoying a morning off from preparations for the World Cup. It has been an intense pre-season programme, designed to push the Red Roses to their limits to ensure that they are as ready as they can be when they depart for the tournament in late September – and one that has, perversely, coincided almost precisely with two months of record temperatures.
“It’s been hot, very hot!” Bern begins of a summer of suffering that has further united a settled squad. “I feel like we are really bonding over the hard work. You’ve got to pull each other out of the holes.
