Maggie Alphonsi considers the racism which still stalks English rugby and then, calmly and thoughtfully, she explains when she feels it bearing down on her most. “It’s when I’ve talked about wanting to be the president of the RFU, and the reason I’ve been singled out is because of my skin colour,” she says. “My gender has been less of an issue even if people still go: ‘As a woman, what do you know about rugby?’ or: ‘You’re just ticking the boxes, woke this, woke that.’ But my skin colour seems to matter more because I get tweets which say: ‘This country is only 3% black people so why don’t you go back to where you came from?’”
Alphonsi comes from Edmonton, in north London, and she smiles patiently at the prejudice and stupidity that motivate her to seek radical change in the game she loves. She won the Pat Marshall award for world rugby personality of the year ahead of Richie McCaw in 2011, helped England to become world champions in 2014 and, as a brilliant and intensely physical flanker, changed the way in which women’s rugby is played in this country. Alphonsi is now on the Rugby Football Union council and she will again be a pundit on ITV when the men’s World Cup begins next week. Her experience and knowledge of rugby is profound and yet, as a black woman, she still endures a stream of abuse.
