Women's Six Nations 2025, Week Four
This should be a weekend of buildup for the big showdown and jockeying for final positions. But the rugby gods are fickle, and several of these matches have wider ramifications, France and Italy face each other again in Pool D of the RWC for example, in August, so there are a lot of subplots. The Matches Italy v France Sometimes clichés exist for a reason. “It was a game of two halves,” may be a cliché, but sometimes it’s just accurate. In the first half we saw 33 points, in the second half only 8 until the last five minutes when the Italians were chasing the game and conceded two soft tries. In the whole first half Italy conceded only two penalties, they’d conceded twice as many in the first ten minutes of the second half, and whilst you wouldn’t say that they were profligate, there was a steady trickle of Italian penalties throughout the half, I think 10 in total. In the first half Italy had a million lineouts (I think it was 16), won them all, routinely took that into a driving mau...