Sarah Hunter does hard yards in time for Six Nations

It’s a curious kind of half-life being led by England’s female rugby players as they get ready for their version of the Six Nations. Curious but entirely familiar to anyone who can remember how the men did things a generation ago, holding down full-time employment while getting as fit as time allows and enjoying their occasional bursts into the limelight.

If anything, Sarah Hunter, England’s 15-a-side captain and No 8, is physically fitter than her male counterpart of the amateur era – someone like Dean Richards, in the late 1980s. Or maybe the great ‘Deano’ is a poor example: he famously left a rowing machine delivered to him by the Rugby Football Union in its box in the corner of his garage.

The point is Hunter is doing all she can to make herself the best rugby player she can be, while stoically accepting the women’s game has not reached a stage that can justify her packing in the day job as a university rugby development officer with the RFU.

“At my club Bristol, we have a fan base of maybe 50 or 60 people,” says Hunter. “It’s more than the one man and a dog we used to get, so it is growing, slowly. We have all seen how women’s football has gone, with the Premier League on TV and attracting decent crowds. When they got 55,000 to Wembley for an England match [versus Germany] last November, we just went, ‘Wow!’ But women’s football is a good few years ahead of women’s rugby.”

The mention of 15-a-side above is necessary, as the RFU, in common with its counterparts in several other countries, have contracted a squad of 19 players to sidestep the full version of the game this year and concentrate on sevens in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.

The master plan is for those players to be reintegrated into 15-a-side in time for the World Cup in Ireland in the summer of next year. England won the World Cup in France in 2014, and were plastered on to the front pages of the national press. But Emily Scarratt, whose name was beginning to make an impression on the public, will not be seen in this Six Nations. And Maggie Alphonsi, the team’s best-known face, now retired from rugby and summarising for ITV, is one who doubts whether the plan will pay off as intended next year.

Hunter, as the captain, can only present an optimistic face, together with an infectious giggle. “We played a club game against Worcester at Ashton Gate in September,” she says, referring to one of a number of occasions when the women have cleverly piggybacked on a men’s match – a couple of them at Twickenham. “There were around 1,500 spectators [a quarter of the number who had watched Bristol’s men v Bedford earlier in the afternoon] and we felt a pressure to put on a good spectacle, to show women’s rugby in its best light, knowing there were potential supporters who might just come again.”

Sky Sports broadcast the recent Women’s Premiership final between Richmond and Saracens. It was played, also in front of 1,500 spectators, at Harlequins straight after a men’s European match and free entry was on offer to those who just wanted to see the women play.

But otherwise the week-to-week club games on Sundays might attract family and friends and not many more. Attendances such as the 20,000 for the World Cup final in 2014, and 13,253 – then a women’s world record – for the 2010 version at The Stoop, are cherished one-offs. The French tournament was said to have attracted up to 1.5 million viewers on TV.

To hear Hunter describe her training regime is to appreciate the work that is going in. Admittedly, the RFU is an amenable employer but she must still account for 37-hour weeks, as do the great majority of the 30 players in the England Six Nations squad (the others are students), while completing a fitness programme set by the strength and conditioning coach, Luke Woodhouse, of the English Institute of Sport. “The programme is both short term to take us up to our summer tour,” says Hunter, “and longer term on to the 2017 World Cup.

“It is not just about improving fitness and speed, or getting bigger quads or whatever. It is designed to develop your onfield rugby. It has progressed from being what you would need to do as a rugby player, to what you need as a forward, then as a member of the back row, down to being what you need to improve, yourself.”

Being Sarah Hunter demands solo training or sessions with a regional “hub” of half a dozen players based at the University of Bath. There are similar hubs from Exeter in the South-west to London to the North-east, and each has an allocated physiotherapist, doctor and soft-tissue therapist. The England coaches Scott Bemand (backs) and Matt Ferguson (forwards) visit as often as possible, working on skills and aspects of match play, because time together as a full England squad is short: a four-day camp was completed on Sunday, then they fly to Scotland on Thursday, play in Cumbernauld on Friday, return on Saturday and won’t see each other again until the trip to Italy next week. It’s exciting but definitely disjointed.