ABIGAIL Mowbray (may her tribe increase) is leaning exhausted over the perimeter fence, blood seeping through her blonde hair, one or two pertinent observations about the state of play and the way of the world faintly audible through her distress.

"Bollocks," she says.

Someone's tying around her head the sort of bandage that would have trussed a mediumsized mummy. "You'll be all right," says Tony Corps, one of the coaches, "people get smashed in the face all the time."


Abi's scrum half for Darlington Mowden Park Sharks women's rugby team, who'll win North Division 1 if they beat visitors Leos, from Leeds. Fifteen minutes have passed, they're 5-0 up, she returns full frontal to replace the blood replacement.

If football is a game for gentleman played by hooligans - and rugby, as someone pithily observed, the opposite - then what's to be made of this larrikin lot?

"We were a bit unsure when they joined us two years ago,"

admits a senior Mowden Park man. "We thought they might be a bit wishy-washy, then I saw them play. I just thought Bloody hell."

The Sharks don't just like a bit of rough, they positively love it.

Assured that she looks gorgeous, Abi's back fearlessly to the fray. It's not her but one of the opposition who'll shortly be carted off in an ambulance. It's the afternoon of Mothering Sunday; they could call this one Scrum Mothers Do Have em.

THE Sharks surfaced 12 years ago in Ripon, moved to Thirsk, arrived at Mowden Park in the summer of 2006, one of 19 Mowden teams embracing 400 players.

What really made their presence felt, however, was beating the Under-19 Colts side in the boat race, the traditional post-match drinking competition said to prove a player's manhood - or not, as the case may be.

"The Colts thought the girls must have cheated somehow, so challenged them to another race and lost again," recalls Graham Sykes, Mowden's grounds chairman. "The ladies won a lot of respect after that."

If this lot have bad heads next morning, it's not necessarily through being kicked in the girlies.

Players are drawn from throughout the North-East, mainly Tyneside. Four are in the England squad, several others have played for England Under 19s and Georgina Roberts - known as George, but with little obvious comparison to her from The Famous Five - has successfully auditioned for Gladiators, about to return to television.

"The quality of rugby is really good,"

says Tony Corps, with the team from the start. "Obviously you don't have the same bulk and physicality, but there's the same skill, the same courage and maybe even more enthusiasm. Coaching them is great because you tell them to do something, they listen and then they do it. It's much more difficult with boys."

Heidi Swaffield, 25-year-old team manager and openside flanker, agrees. "Pound for pound, I reckon some of us are better than the men, it's the mental side more than anything.

"You know you're going to get a bit of a bashing, but it's being able to get through it. For many of the girls, rugby comes before everything else. It's the first thing in their lives."

Should they win the match, and the title, they face a threeway play-off for a place against the likes of Wasps and Saracens in the Premiership, whence they departed in contentious circumstances after being unable to fulfil a fixture because so many players were on England duty.

"There was an old fashioned hoo-hah," says Graham Sykes.

"The Women's RFU are a pretty meaty bunch."

Outside, head coach Jo Hull is leading the final warm-ups, Shark practice, as it were. Some of the language is a bit unladylike, too. "This is a massive game for us," says Jo.

"You have to be really up for it, aggressive, in their faces."

Some of the players are charging at the big yellow training pads, team mates sheltering behind them. "You have to hit them like they're wearing a Leos' shirt," says Tamara Taylor - team captain, England player and recent cranial contestant on a television show called Eggheads.

Arranging a team picture, the sponsor's photographer asks if they have any balls. The girls stifle a snigger; the answer's undoubtedly.

THOUGH there are one or two you'd not want to meet on a dark night, not even when taking the Rottweiler for its bedtime constitutional, the big surprise is that they all look so remarkably (shall we say) feminine.

"I can do ladylike. I've a dress and a skirt and photographs to prove it," says 21-year-old Katy McLean, another of the England elite.

She'd taken up rugby as a seven-year-old at Westoe, South Shields, where her father and brother played, defected to hockey but returned when 16. "I think it's because I like rolling around in the mud and I love the people," she says.

"If anything it's even more physical than the men, even more something to get really stuck into. We're down here training twice a week, training on our own most other days."

Her worst injury has been a partially dislocated elbow. "I've been very lucky," she insists.

Fortified in the dressing by Tesco's fruit-flavoured fish - clearly this is a theme team - they're leading through Katy after five minutes. Thereafter it's pretty dull - lots of stoppages, several injuries and an ambulance - with some sinkor- swim moments for the Sharks.

The scrum has a curiously chanted mantra - a chantra -- like rifle drill in Dad's Army.

"I've never had to defend so much in my life," says Heidi, a PE teacher from Hutton Rudby, near Middlesbrough.

Tamara, a Boadecia among leaders, is urging her team on.

Like Nobby Stiles she's combative and wears socks around her ankles, unlike Nobby she's tall and bonny and has all her own teeth. Being hit by Tam Taylor may be akin to being hit by a Chieftainess tank.

Like Nobby's mate Norman Hunter, the Sharks bite your legs.

Among the crowd of 100 or so is Julia Welsh, mother of Ashleigh Welsh, the full back who'd spent the first ten months of her life in plaster of Paris because of continually dislocating hips. "She was always a very patient little girl. I suppose you have to be if you spend ten months in plaster,"

says Julia.

So had she ever envisaged spending Mother's Day watching her little girl riotously rucking round a rugby field?

"The doctor assured us that she'd be able to walk and ride a bike," says Julia. "I don't think he ever mentioned anything about rugby."

IT'S coming in cold, the lads in the crowd seeking improbable warmth through great plastic jugs of ale. Several Sharks players are charging like they're up against yellow training pads. It's fearsome stuff, like basking your brains out.

The ambulance has swiftly arrived, the Leos lass lying painfully on the grass, with a heavily bandaged knee. "Can't you just leave it?" she asks the paramedics.

"Sorry, pet," they tell her.

Late on, Katy scores two more tries, prompting the champagne corks to fly - probably extra Tesco fruitflavoured fish, too - and the post-match party to be launched.

The theme's "underwater", too; Heidi's a deep-sea diver. "It helps you unwind," she says, coming up for air.

Graham Sykes looks on, pint in hand, approvingly if ungrammatically. "They're just one of the lads," he says. "All of them."