Welcome back to the Ruck, the journalist's rugby podcast from The Times and the Sunday Times where the quarterfinal

lineup for the Women's World Cup is pretty much set. We're going to look back on the weekend

and ahead to the final round of pool fixtures in just a moment throughout this podcast. I'm

Alfie Reynolds and Elgin Alderman. We are on our travels for a change. We are. We're here at East

Sussex National, which is where the Australia team are based. We're most of the, well, a lot of the interest is based down near Brighton this weekend. So that's where England are facing Australia and New Zealand and Ireland on Sunday as well. So we're just a bit north of Brighton. You pick me up at Uckfield Station very kindly. And here we are sheltering away from the rain one of those drives on the way down

where you see all sorts of places that you would never normally see once you pull off the motorway

driving for about 40 minutes but picking elgin up so nice to be out and about once again and the

reason for the pod coming a day later is because we thought you know what let's try and get into some

of these camps let's try and speak to the players the people involved in this So coming up later in the pod, we're going to be chatting to the

Walleroo's co-captain, Emily Chancellor, and we'll get on to everything else as well. Another

thumping win for the Red Roses. The quarter final lineup, as I say, is pretty much set in stone,

but still some fascinating matches coming up this weekend.

First up, though, Elgin, should we start with Italy versus South Africa?

Because I suppose that game, the victory for South Africa, coupled with the Walleroo's draw of the USA,

we had the two best games of this World Cup by an absolute mile on the weekend just gone.

Yeah, the South Africa win historic for a

variety of reasons. Firstly, in terms of this tournament, it was the first upset. You know, if you take

the very basic ruling that if the team that's listed as the away team on the scoreboard wins

at this World Cup, that means it was an upset. So in that regard, South Africa ranked number 12 in

the world,

winning 2924 against Italy, who were number eight, very much pencilled in as the runners up in Pool D. But for South Africa now, making it into the knockouts for the very first time.

And what's so interesting about the Springbok women is that obviously the Springbok men,

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