Zoe Harrison blasts World Rugby's smaller ball plan for women's rugby

England fly-half Zoe Harrison has delivered a blunt rebuke to World Rugby’s plan to use a smaller ball in the women’s game, calling it “the worst decision someone has ever made.” Her criticism lands at a sensitive moment for the elite women’s programme, with England now the reigning world champions after beating Canada in the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup final.

World Rugby’s new bespoke size 4.5 ball, developed with Gilbert, is about 3% smaller than a regulation size 5 but carries the same weight. The governing body says early player feedback from trials suggested it could provide a better platform for handling skills, a claim that places performance data at the centre of a long-running debate over whether women’s rugby should use the same ball as the men’s game or a version tailored specifically for female athletes.

The trial has already moved through several levels of the pathway. World Rugby expanded the ball test to the 2025 HSBC SVNS series on 26 November 2025 after earlier use in U18 and U20 international competitions, and in April 2026 confirmed that the smaller ball would also be used at WXV later this year. That makes the equipment change more than a lab experiment: it is now heading into the elite international calendar, where World Rugby says the results will matter for the women’s game’s future direction.

The wider backdrop is the WXV Global Series, launched on 18 September 2025 and due to run from 2026 to 2028. World Rugby says the series will feature more than 100 matches across the cycle, with the top 12 teams playing in a home-and-away touring model and teams ranked 13 to 18 competing at a single destination funded by the governing body. The aim is fixture certainty and a pathway to the 2029 Women’s Rugby World Cup in Australia. For supporters of the smaller ball, the case is that a change in equipment could sharpen handling and open up the game; for Harrison and others, the sharper question is who gets to decide what fits women’s rugby, and whether that decision is being driven by evidence or by assumptions from above.