Zoe Aldcroft rummages around in her rugby bag and pulls out a knitted figure. “This is Jonny,” beams the Red Roses lock, sporting a gap-toothed smile as she passes over a questionable lookalike of Jonny Wilkinson, England’s 2003 World Cup hero, in his Toulon kit.
Aldcroft was given it by a childhood friend when she left home, aged 16, to pursue rugby at Hartpury College. It was also the age she discovered that there was an England women’s team – she had lacked female rugby role models growing up so Wilkinson filled the void.
Fast forward more than a decade and England’s new captain is sitting in a coffee shop that sponsors Gloucester-Hartpury, the three-time Premiership Women’s Rugby champions and the club that have helped to mould Aldcroft into an irrepressible force in the game. A week ago, she mingled with her counterpart, Maro Itoje, on an England rugby photoshoot. Times may have changed, but Aldcroft has not. Her Jonny doll has occupied a ritualistic place in her kit bag since her teenage years and her meticulous attention to detail bears an uncanny likeness to the English rugby great.
“I do have a bit of an obsession,” she admits. “I have to practise something until I’ve got it right – carries, little tips that I’ll try and get into training. If I play badly or do something wrong after a game I won’t be able to stop thinking about it. If I drop a restart, it will literally be all I think about for the next week.”
‘I do think about the World Cup pretty much most days’
The whirring bustle of the cafe is unfortunate given Aldcroft can only hear out of one ear. Two days before we met, she perforated her left ear drum in Gloucester-Hartpury’s last game of the regular Premiership Women’s Rugby season. I suggested we reschedule but Aldcroft insisted on keeping her diary commitment.
It is this sort of devotion that explains why the 28-year-old has been entrusted with the Red Roses captaincy in a pivotal year for women’s sport. Aldcroft will lead her country in what many have tipped to be England’s biggest sporting event of the year: a home Rugby World Cup, which has already broken records with unprecedented demand for tickets and sky-rocketing interest. “I do think about the World Cup pretty much most days,” says Aldcroft, who has 58 caps. “I’m trying to do everything I can to be in the best place. I don’t want to have any regrets. I want to win it so badly.”
The upcoming Six Nations will take on added significance given it will not only act as a shop window for the women’s rugby’s showpiece, but also the first test of Aldcroft’s leadership. England’s assignment is obvious: to become Grand Slam champions for a fifth consecutive year – and Aldcroft is ready to lead from the front. “I’m a rugby perfectionist, which is the most difficult thing because the perfect game doesn’t exist in rugby,” she says. “But I’m always chasing it. I’m so competitive, in my head I don’t have a choice not to give 100 per cent. If a job needs doing, I’ll do it. That’s my thought process during a game.
“I’m so hard on myself. My husband, Luke, gets sick of me. I’ll come home and say to him, ‘I think I’m getting dropped this week.’ I’d always rather keep chasing myself than accepting if I’m a good player. I want to keep chasing more. I know I can be better. I know I can carry harder.”
Her yearning for personal growth should strike fear into her rivals given her dizzying metrics. Aldcroft took more line-out steals and hit more attacking rucks than any other international player in 2024. She also ranked the second-highest for the number of tackles made, marginally bettered by her club and country team-mate, Alex Matthews. She completed all 81 of her tackle attempts during last year’s domestic season, too.
Behind Aldcroft’s unparalleled consistency on the pitch is an incessant drive to fine-tune her performances. “I’ll watch my own game back about three times before 6am the next morning,” she says. “I have to. Even if we’ve gone out for team celebrations, I’ll get in at midnight and I’ll watch the game back as soon as I get in. I’m quite wired after a game, but I also can’t put it to bed until I’ve seen it. When you’re on the pitch you have no idea if you’re any good. If there’s a decision I’ve made I always like to check if I made the right one.”
Aldcroft might be an analyst’s cheat code but she has a likeable humility to match. When she won World Rugby’s Women’s Player of the Year award in 2021, her mum, Ros, erected a photo of her daughter receiving her accolade in her Scarborough coffee shop. “I hated it,” said Aldcroft. “I’m not even joking, this photo she had on the wall of me was massive. Last Christmas, I got her a shirt to frame which she could hang there instead. It’s a bit more modest.”
Yet Ros knew the family effort it had taken to reach that point. Aged eight, she followed her brother, Jonathan, through the doors of Scarborough RUFC’s clubhouse, where she spent three seasons as the only girl, not just mucking in with the boys but outclassing every one of them. Her gender was her superpower. “From a young age I just had a super-competitive edge and thought, ‘Whatever a boy could do, I could do,’” reflects Aldcroft. “I remember in a game once I had to make this last-ditch tackle on a boy and we smashed faces. He went down and there was blood everywhere. I really wanted to cry but I knew how bad it would look if I did, so I held it in and sucked it up.”
When she was 11, her parents made the weekly three-hour trips to West Park Leeds RUFC, the nearest club with a girl’s team (Scarborough, like many clubs up and down the country, has caught up and now boasts a thriving women and girl’s section). At 16, she made the life-changing decision to enrol at Hartpury, the esteemed college that has produced a plethora of rugby talent. There she met Danielle Waterman and Heather Fisher, both 2014 World Cup winners with England. The pair lit a spark within her and, two years later, she was capped at international level.
As well as a rugby obsessive, Aldcroft is a self-confessed spa addict, but she also pursues more economical activities in her downtime. “I’m doing a foot health course because I want to be a podiatrist after rugby,” she says. “Up until a few months ago, that was my main switch-off because I had assignments to do and it was quite stressful. But I’ve finished all the theory side of it now and have a two-week practical placement after the Six Nations.”
Her interest in podiatry stemmed from a series of foot injuries she suffered during the early part of her career – Aldcroft has broken three separate bones in her feet – but she also has a wider goal. “I want to make manky feet better,” she laughs, before amusing me with the many diseases that can be traced simply by looking at someone’s feet. “A lot of people get creeped out by the whole foot thing, but there’s a lot of science around foot health.”
How else does she tear herself away from rugby? “I love being with Luke and Luna, my dog,” says Aldcroft. “I love baking sourdough, hanging out with my friends, going to a cafe and chin-wagging with them for hours.”
She is yet to embrace her media duties with the same enthusiasm, but Aldcroft is fully aware of the spotlight that will be on her later this year when England will aim to avenge their World Cup final heartache three years ago in New Zealand. Aldcroft, who was concussed 28 minutes into the final showdown against the Black Ferns at Eden Park and was forced to watch the remainder of the match on the sidelines, has spoken about her embarrassment at returning home without the trophy, for which England had been overwhelming favourites to lift.
With a new head coach in John Mitchell at the helm, there has been ample time for collective and individual reflection. “We were so ready. We were on it,” insists Aldcroft, the pain still discernible in her voice. “But the hurdles came in that game and we didn’t expect them. Looking back, even now, I still believe we were ready. Even in the final play of the game, when I was watching, I was like, ‘Oh my god, we’ve won, there’s no chance we’re not going to win.’ But there have been some big learnings. Off the field, we were not as connected as we are now. In 2022, we had a strong squad but some things let us down culture-wise. Going into this World Cup, we want to create bonds between one another that are unmatched.”
It is this culture piece that has been prioritised by Mitchell, who was nine years older than Aldcroft is now when he took charge of the All Blacks in 2001, aged 37. He was sacked after the side’s third-place finish at the 2003 World Cup and would later work with Clive Woodward and Eddie Jones in two separate stints with England men. Prior to taking up the Red Roses reins – a decision that stunned many – he was Japan’s defence coach at the 2023 men’s World Cup. His lack of experience in the women’s game raised eyebrows, but Aldcroft speaks of the 60-year-old in glowing terms.
“His main thing is that culture wins,” she says. “To win a World Cup, you need that extra something, that extra inside belief from everyone. He’s brought that in with the new culture. That’s a massive thing he’s driven. He obviously has all of his lived experiences with really good teams but they haven’t [always] had the results they wanted because of some underlying thing. When culture is super strong, a team can be unstoppable.”
Aldcroft and the rest of England’s six-strong leadership team have already been thrown a curveball this year. In January Mitchell sent the group, which comprises former skipper Marlie Packer and her co-vice captain Meg Jones, flanker Sadia Kabeya and 2014 World Cup winners Alex Matthews and Natasha Hunt, on an impromptu team-building session at the headquarters of an industry-leading manufacturer of domestic appliances.
The group had 15 minutes to present to more than 200 employees at the company about their values as a leadership group. “It felt like we were in an episode of The Apprentice,” laughs Aldcroft. “Most of our girls fear public speaking. We had Mo and Meg, who were super confident in that area, but it was me, Alex and Sadia who were a bit like, ‘Oh my goodness.’ It was a great challenge. We all had to speak for about five minutes each, so for half an hour in total. It was a really beneficial day, even if it was a bit mortifying. We were exhausted by the end.”
Stamina will be key given the long year that lies ahead but Aldcroft, like her first rugby idol, will be ready to guide England to greatness.
