Red Roses and Canada set to renew rivalry at Sandy Park one year after 2025 World Cup final

One year on from the 2025 Rugby World Cup final at Twickenham, England’s Red Roses will meet Canada at Sandy Park on Saturday in their first encounter since that showpiece. England defeated Canada in that final, which was played in front of a crowd of 81,885 at Twickenham.

A whiteboard in the Red Roses camp carries the message “Train like you have never won, play like you don’t know how to lose,” as the side prepares for the Test. Players cite memories of the final’s atmosphere — thousands of fans waiting as teams left their buses and the noise inside a full Twickenham — while Canada went into the match as underdogs after having eliminated New Zealand in the semi-final. England entered the 2025 final as heavy favourites and had been unbeaten since the previous World Cup final in 2022.

Canada struck first in the early minutes when Asia Hogan-Rochester scored the opening try, but England responded when Ellie Kildunne evaded several defenders to score. Kildunne recalled the moment: “You get those chances which are a ‘wow, as if I got through there’. That is what it was, I didn’t really expect to get through but I did. I remember scoring and looking down the field at my teammates.”

Olivia Apps, who came on as a second-half substitute, described the stadium noise and her reaction at full time: “Once the stadium is that full and that loud it is just a different noise, I don’t know how to explain it.” She added she was “shocked and heartbroken” and “sad to see how disappointed your teammates are and how much you know they put into it.”

Apps identified two main areas where Canada fell short in the final, highlighting a need for greater composure and improved set-piece performance. “For us as a team coming away from that World Cup we know that in order to beat England, in order to beat the best, we have to have our set piece down,” she said, adding: “I think that you can really feel that is something we are working and focusing on in training.”

Sadia Kabeya, named player of the final, offered a different appraisal of how England gained the edge, pointing to defensive aggression and breakdown control. “I think we knew coming into that game that Canada loves to play with momentum,” Kabeya said. “They love to play on top and without structure. The easiest way to do that is if you have a really fast breakdown. So our main thing was to have dominant collisions and to slow down that breakdown.”

The final’s impact has been felt in both countries: Premiership Women’s Rugby recorded a 23% rise in attendances across the English top flight in the 2025-26 season, and Apps says “Underage women’s rugby is up 300% and the underage groups have the highest amount of registrations that they have ever had.” The 2025 final was the second World Cup showpiece between the two nations after England also beat Canada in the 2014 final.

Both teams treat Saturday’s match as a renewal of that rivalry rather than a repeat of the final, with Apps saying she is “curious to really see how both teams have changed and evolved over the year” and that she does not feel added pressure: “There’s not 80,000 people watching us or the big lore of the World Cup final. It’s just a Test match and we can just see what happens.” England are focused on their run of consecutive wins and on measuring how they perform against Canada across formats; Kabeya said: “It’s just another game. We played them in the World Cup. We played them in WXV. Now we are playing them in a Test series. For us it is about how good we can be and we will see if Canada can hold out.”

England’s next confirmed fixture after the match with Canada is against New Zealand on 26 September, a game scheduled to be played in front of more than 50,000 spectators.