Sadia Kabeya: ‘I wasn’t one who set their sights on playing for England’

W hen Sadia Kabeya was learning her trade as a No 7, there was one person she wanted to play like – and it wasn’t Courtney Lawes, or Peter O’Mahony, or Siya Kolisi. “I had no interest in watching men’s games,” she says, shaking her head. Her inspiration was Marlie Packer, the woman who has been wearing the No 7 jersey for England for nearly a decade.

Last November, for the final half-hour of the World Cup final, Kabeya filled Packer’s shoes, in only her eighth international appearance. It’s a huge validation of the 21-year-old’s talent that she will start alongside her in Saturday’s Women’s Six Nations opener against Scotland – playing at No 6 for the first time in her life.

“I’ve been learning all the lineouts and they said they wanted to have me and Marlie play together so I knew it was something that could potentially happen,” says Kabeya, who has played at blindside only a handful times during her single season at Wasps. “It’ll be like having two sevens on the pitch – the big difference is the lineouts. I’ve always been a lineout jumper but playing seven you don’t usually use those skills!”

By Kabeya’s own admission, she’s someone happy to “go with the flow”. “I’m quite a head-down person,” she smiles, “I just get around the pitch and do my job.” It makes her particularly suited to life as a flanker. “In that position you can never complain, you can never do too much work.”

Her aggressive tackling is another reason: it’s been turning heads since she made her Premier 15s debut in 2019. She topped the league’s tackle count last year and leads this season’s, and last year she was the Rugby Player Association’s player of the year in only her third season.

The responsibility she has been handed in England’s defensive