Quick fire questions with Sara Cox MBE

Recently announcing her retirement from refereeing at an international level, Sara Cox looks back on her international career with our partners at ACME Whistles in a quickfire Q&A.

Spain against Ireland in Spain

Honestly, it was terrifying! It was something that I'd never seen before, I'd never been a part of before. I'm in the middle of nowhere in Spain and I have met my touch judge once, who subsequently ended up as my manager.

It was amazing but tough at the same time because your mind is buzzing with questions and doubt like, ‘oh my goodness. What, does this look like? How do I do this?’

I totally got butterflies due to that mix of excitement and nerves like you get when you’re a kid. But then I remember standing there listening to the national anthems and in that moment thinking ‘well this is cool!’

My pathway up to that point would have mainly been in the men's game. We didn't have the likes of the Premiership Women’s Rugby (PWR), we didn't have the setup that is in place now.

We have seen massive changes in the women’s game. You only need to go back 10 years and the women's game was very different, so as a referee it was more around having the chance to develop skill in the men’s game that could transfer to the womens game.

Although I think there is more awareness to come around women’s rugby, we've got more understanding of what the women's game looks like and how new referees can develop a career pathway through that channel.

A massive advantage, and I also see it as an advantage of going from the women's game into the men's game.

You'd get nuances that will happen in the women's game that don’t necessarily happen in the men's game and vice versa.

I think all of that combined has helped me become a more complete referee than just sticking with one channel or the other.

The strangest thing I can remember as an international ref was about 20 minutes into the first half of an international and I get a random Italian voice talking in my earpiece. I could not work out what was going on. It went on for a good couple of minutes, and I ended up pulling my earpiece out.

We go in at half time and I speak to the number four, who’s also Italian, and I asked what was happening down the comms and they explained that the comms signal had actually picked up the local mountain rescue service and they were looking for someone on the mountain and we were getting all the transmission through our earpiece.

It goes back to that evolution of the game.

I was lucky enough to be able to run touch in the 2010 World Cup. When you look back to that tournament there were just one or two temporary stands in a university field.

The whole set up from the organisation, to the cameras and broadcasters that were involved, have gone through such a massive journey. I think those have been big landmarks for me.

Whoever's hosting the next few World Cups has got a lot to live up to from what they did in in this one just gone.

I think it depends on who and which competition. But I say one game that I thoroughly enjoyed was my 50th and having a beer in the back with a couple of players that I now consider to be friends.

There's a couple of girls that have played in the Japan and Spain teams that I did a lot of my career with, who I've also seen at club level and always stayed in touch with.

I had one that just said, ‘oh, right’. And that was about it. But seeing some of the engagement on social media has been really wonderful.

I didn't really expect anybody to pay much attention to what was happening, and I definitely didn't get the impression that I was going to make it onto some of the channels that I did.

So when it did happen, I sat down and looked at it and said, ‘well, maybe I did actually make an impact’. As a referee our job is to be as invisible as possible. If nobody is talking about the ref, you’ve had a great game.

I've got quite a big personality, so I’m sure I'd made myself heard, but actually realising that people knew you existed and that you made quite an impression on them was really refreshing and really nice to see.

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