‘Wow this is what proper international rugby feels like’

Sadia Kabeya replaced her idol in the World Cup final and the flanker has since earned a starting place in the Six Nations opener against Scotland

When Sadia Kabeya was learning her trade as a No 7, there was one person she wanted to play like – and it was not Courtney Lawes or Peter O’mahony or Siya Kolisi. “I had no interest in watching men’s games,” she says, shaking her head. Her inspiration was Marlie Packer, the woman who has been wearing the No 7 jersey for England for nearly a decade.

Last November, for the final half-hour of the World Cup final, Kabeya filled Packer’s shoes, in only her eighth international appearance. It is a huge validation of the 21-year-old’s talent that she will start alongside her in today’s Women’s Six Nations opener against Scotland – playing at No 6 for the first time in her life.

“I’ve been learning all the lineouts and they said they wanted to have me and Marlie play together so I knew it was something that could potentially happen,” says Kabeya, who has played at blindside only a handful of times during her single season at Wasps. “It’ll be like having two sevens on the pitch – the big difference is the lineouts. I’ve always been a lineout jumper but playing seven you don’t usually use those skills!”

By Kabeya’s own admission she is someone happy to “go with the flow”. “I’m quite a head-down person,” she smiles. “I just get around the pitch and do my job.” It makes her particularly suited to life as a flanker. “In that position you can never complain, you can never do too much work.”

‘I’m quite an expressive sassy person, typical for a south London girl’

Her aggressive tackling is another reason: it has been turning heads since she made her Premier 15s debut in 2019. She topped the league’s tackle count last year and leads this season’s, and last year she was the Rugby Player Association’s player of the year in only her third season.

The responsibility she has been handed in England’s defensive line has taken her aback. “I don’t think of myself as a leader, so it’s something I was nervous about. But defence is a big part of my game and the coaches think I have the knowledge to communicate that to the rest of the squad.” But then the story of Kabeya’s career is packed with people who have appreciated her skills far quicker than she has.

As a south London schoolgirl she followed her older brother into tumbling and gymnastics before swapping to athletics. “And if there was ever a ball game going on in the playground, me and my brothers joined it,” says Kabeya. Her older brother, now 24, has moved to Canada to compete at the highest level of cheerleading; her younger brother plays flag football because he loves American sports “but hates contact”. Perhaps having such a hard-tackling sister is the reason why.

Their mother runs marathons and a 10-year-old Kabeya would beg to join her on her practice runs although, she admits, she cannot imagine doing the same today. Her first taste of rugby came at Harris City Academy where her PE coaches and early champions were England’s twin forwards Bryony and Poppy Cleall (“real rugby nerds,” as Kabeya describes them). With their encouragement she soon joined her first club and the age-group pathway.

Even stepping up to top-flight rugby, the relaxed Kabeya was just in it for fun – “I had no ambitions, I wasn’t one of those people who set their sights on playing for England” – and rejected Bryony’s plea to join her at Saracens, because the vibe was too serious. Instead she made three-hour round trips to train and play at Richmond, “somewhere I could learn and felt comfortable to make mistakes”.

Facing women older and bigger than her for the first time was a shock – “I was definitely achey for the majority of the season” – but she was surprised to find herself starting every game.

There have been two moves since, to Wasps and then to Loughborough, where she also studies sports science. Moving up rugby’s performance ladder has been an education in more ways than one. It has taught her both about herself and the socio-racial stratification of the country she represents. Growing up in Crystal Palace, playing club sport in Croydon, she had been surrounded by people of colour. The rugby heartland of west London was new territory.

“I was suddenly meeting different people and, being quite young, it was easy to feel I needed to change to fit in,” she remembers. “Not my physical aspects so much but the music I listened to, the jokes I made. I’m quite an expressive sassy person, which is typical for a girl from south London, where you’ve got to have some street cred growing up. When I moved to Richmond I was quite quiet, trying to tone that down.” She would never have thought to play her own music – Afro beats, R&B – in the changing room.

But when her season at Wasps coincided with both lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests, the club put on a Zoom call that invited the six black women in the squad to speak about their experiences. “It was my first time realising ‘people do want to listen to you’. I realised it’s not about being the same as everyone else, and I really felt I’d found my people. That was the first turning point.”

Shaunagh Brown, the England and Harlequins prop, offered more support and friendship. “When I got my first call-up” – to play in England’s 2021 autumn internationals against Canada and the US – “she said don’t be afraid, don’t quiet your voice, be yourself. I’ll be here, and not everyone’s going to like you but that doesn’t matter. Just make sure you don’t dim your light.”

The two ended up as roommates at the World Cup a year later, even if Brown did have to move out when Kabeya caught Covid 10 days before England’s opener against Fiji. “I felt like poo so I went to bed, tested and fell asleep before I saw the result. When I woke up at 3am and checked there was the hard line …”

Kabeya knew that her best chance of a start was in the Fiji game, “so it was a rush to get over the illness and then get fit.” An exercise bike and dumbbells were delivered to her hotel room, and added motivation came when she saw her name on the team sheet while still isolating. The first 10 minutes against Fiji turned out to be the toughest she had ever experienced on a rugby pitch.

“I was like: wow, this is what proper international rugby feels like. After our first or second try I dropped the kick-off. I said to myself, ‘Oh my God Sadia, you need to switch on and get your head in the game’.” She finished it as player of the match.

Last month she was named Rising Star at the inaugural Rugby Black List awards – an honour she ranks highly for coming from “people you relate to, who only want to lift you up”. She believes that players have proved themselves more progressive than coaches in that regard: “There’s a misconstrued idea within the coaching scene that we want to take any player of colour and chuck them to the top.” But she also sees improvements in coaches’ awareness of issues surrounding race, and a willingness to deal with them. “In the past people were often uncomfortable, so things got brushed under the rug.”

If she continues her trajectory with England in this tournament, a contract in the summer seems almost inevitable. Until then her Test match fees have been paying her rent, and her friends refuse to buy her drinks at the bar, joking that she is the richest student they know. And her move to No 6 has already blindsided plenty of onlookers: rugby omens do not come better.