Ellie Kildunne recognizes she gets in 2025 with a target on her back however the England complete back would certainly not have it differently as she intends to maintain wrecking with the glass ceiling.
The 25-year-old is the ruling Women’s Six Nations Player of the Championship, in addition to World Rugby’s Women’s 15s Player of the Year after taking pleasure in an excellent 2024 for the Red Roses.
The assumptions are skies high for even more success as England get ready for their Women’s Six Nations opener versus Italy in York on Sunday in what might be a transformative year for ladies’s rugby– with a World Cup on home dirt boiling down the track in very early fall.
And while Kildunne recognizes the specific awards she has actually obtained will certainly not have actually gone undetected; it is a standing she is welcoming.
“2024 was not just a successful year for the team I play in but personally I was recognised and given awards that probably still haven’t sunk in yet,” said Kildunne, speaking at Allianz Stadium, where the Red Roses will host France in the final game of the Women’s Six Nations.
“Six Nations Player of the Championship and World Player of the Year sounds very cool but it’s not something I think about every day.
“I’m aware I might get a late hit from time to time, I’ve got a bit of a target on my back. But that pressure is a privilege, I’ve worked hard to get to where I am. It’s a special place to be because everyone wants to knock off the person at the top.
“It’s something I’m navigating but I’m very proud to be in this position because I know it comes with power – not something to be abused – but it’s something that if I navigate it right, I can inspire every room I walk into in ways that I haven’t been able to before.
“It’s my job to keep on pushing, smashing through the glass ceilings, and ensuring that as female rugby players we are seen in spaces we haven’t been seen before.
“It’s what we deserve, it’s what the next generation deserves and it’s what the previous generation deserved because they worked hard to get us to this place now. We’ve got the reins, and we can steer it to whatever place we can. I’m proud to be in that position and grateful as well.”
As well as her success with the Red Roses in 2024, Kildunne was likewise component of the Team GB side that contended at the Paris Olympics before a packed-out Stade de France.
That experience, incorporated with having fun before a globe document group for a ladies’s rugby suit when England tackled France in the 2023 Six Nations conquest decider, offered much more evidence of exactly how the video game is expanding at an exceptional rate.
With a home World Cup likewise coming up, Kildunne is thrilled at simply just how much passion there presently remains in the ladies’s video game and can not wait to enter that limelight.
She included: “The moment we ran out for the first game of the Olympics, we were the first game of the women’s competition, the men had played, and we’d seen the crowds for that. We are wired as women and female players that you are always going to be second best to that and not to expect that.
“It felt like Britain’s Got Talent, you are stood behind a wall and can’t actually see the crowd, you can hear them. The moment I came around that bit of wall and saw a sold-out stadium, I really can’t explain the feeling other than saying when kids get dizzy and can’t stop laughing, it felt like that.
“People wanted to watch us play. Moments like that and the Six Nations here at the Allianz show that people want to watch us play. It’s our show time.”
Join the Red Roses as they start their Guinness Women’s Six Nations project, do not miss out on the utmost face-off versus France at Allianz Stadium on Saturday, April 26th. Get your tickets currently!
