England's Red Roses have spent five years winning every Six Nations title on offer, and they have spent the past month being reminded by the rest of women's rugby that the rest of women's rugby is tired of it. Mo Hunt, the Gloucester-Hartpury scrum-half who has emerged as one of John Mitchell's most influential half-back voices, decided this week to stop pretending the resentment did not exist.
"Everyone hates us, don't they?" Hunt told The Guardian's Sarah Rendell in a feature published on Monday 26 May. The line, delivered with a smile, sat at the top of a wide-ranging piece in which Hunt mapped out why England's response to the noise is to keep their foot on the accelerator rather than apologise for the gap.
The context is unusually live. England's depth, fully professional setup and Premiership Women's Rugby club ecosystem have created a Test team that can rotate two fully credentialled XVs without dropping much in standard. France have closed the gap on paper. New Zealand have improved their finishing. Ireland have a smarter game plan than at any point in the professional era. None of those teams has been able to win a Test against England in the current cycle.
Hunt's framing in the piece is that the Red Roses neither court the resentment nor will allow it to dilute their preparation. The home World Cup, she suggested, sits at the end of a multi-year ambition the squad has carried since the 2022 Eden Park final, and the team has neither the time nor the temperament to manage other unions' feelings.
Hunt indicated that the side has matured into a group that no longer feels the need to soften its on-field dominance with diplomatic press answers. The Red Roses, she argued, view a one-sided Six Nations scoreline as evidence of the standards they need to hit at the World Cup, not as a scoreline to be embarrassed by. The benchmark, in Hunt's framing, is the World Cup itself, not the gap to the next-best Six Nations side.
That reading is consistent with the messaging of head coach John Mitchell, whose post-Six Nations debrief emphasised the lack of "sustained pressure" the squad had encountered and warned the players against assuming Test difficulty would scale linearly into the World Cup pool stage. Mitchell has built his team around a forward-driven kick and pressure pattern, the very pattern Squidge Rugby last week described as borderline irresistible against even the most disciplined defensive systems.
The Red Roses XV that runs out against the Black Ferns in their projected World Cup pool collision is likely to feature Hunt at scrum-half alongside a forward pack that has not been seriously moved backwards in any of the last twelve internationals. Bookmakers have England as comfortable favourites for the tournament, and the squad is preparing to walk into a home crowd that the RFU is privately briefing will be the largest paying audience in women's rugby history.
For Hunt, the World Cup ambition is to leave no doubt. The Six Nations dominance, the winning streak, the resentment of teams who cannot pull level - all of it, she suggested, is white noise compared to the chance to lift the trophy at Twickenham later in the year.
"Everyone hates us" is, in that sense, both an acknowledgement and a recruitment line. The Red Roses are not going to slow down. They are going to dare the rest of the world to catch up.
