This season marks the ten-year anniversary of the merging of the women*s and men*s sections of the club, with OUWRFC joining OURFC to form one club. The Varsity Match this year is also being held on March 8th, Internation Women*s Day, and so it seems fitting that in September, we heard from Arun Midha, the Exeter student who was the referee of the first women’s Varsity match. The match was held at Iffley Road on Thursday 10th March 1988, and Arun got in touch to send over various items including photos and programs. I met with him online not long after these items arrived to discuss their history and his experience on the day of the match.
Arun came to Oxford from the Welsh RFU as a qualified referee, admitting that he went for the qualification because he was "so rubbish at rugby” that it was the best way for him to get on the pitch. There were very few refs available for the cuppers competition, so he became one of the defaults, refereeing on Wednesdays while affiliated with the Oxfordshire Referee Society. This provided a pathway for him to get more experienced and he was eventually asked to referee the Major Stanley’s match the year before the first women’s Varsity Match.
This experience refereeing with familiar players on the pitch meant that Arun was used to officiating teams known to him. When I asked him how he managed to resist bias against C*mbridge, he said simply that you “always know somebody”. He went on to tell me about the importance of impartiality in life, a skill I could likely stand to learn (please see previous sentence and its censorship).
The most obvious difference between the men’s matches Arun had previously refereed and this women’s game was the change to the pre-match routine. “Standard practice” had seen him in the changing rooms before kickoff, introducing himself to teams and checking studs. Though he noted that the male coaches and team managers seemed to be allowed entry, Arun was kept out of the changing rooms in a not entirely shocking change to regularly scheduled programming. While he didn’t allow the change to throw him off his game, he did say that the pre-game introduction tended to make it easier to manage players and the game through setting expectations early on.
Despite this, Arun commented that the game was “well-orchestrated and taken seriously”, with no animosity or sleights and a healthy respect amongst both teammates and opposition. He also complimented the standard and fitness of players, many of whom had come from rowing. This time on the river was of course instrumental in building the stamina and grit necessary for a game of rugby. This fortitude is obvious in one of the photos Arun provided (see below), where Anna Spash’s smile despite the blood staining her shirt encapsulates the spirit of rugby at Oxford and beyond.
When Arun himself walked off the pitch, he was welcomed by a bath and pint of bitter in the referee changing rooms, which he described as both “quaint” and “very different from Wales”. C*mbridge had won the day 8-6 (in the days of 4-point tries) but the party continued in Vincent’s Club. OURFC’s relationship with Vinnie’s remains mutually beneficial to this day as they’ve recently taken on the catering at Iffley Road, and many modern matches still end at their headquarters on the High Street. The Tabs were also invited, with their bus leaving in the middle of the night after a monumental day for both Dark and Light Blues. (I would be remiss if I didn’t mention here that the Tabs may have won the first match, but then didn’t get a look-in for the next 13 consecutive years.)
To watch the 2025 Women take on the 'old foe', click here to secure your tickets for the 8th March at StoneX!
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