FINAL: Australia 124, Wales 6
Australia beat Wales 124-6 at CommBank Stadium in Sydney on Sunday, November 1, 2026, in a Jillaroos 124-6 Wales performance that set the biggest winning margin in the history of women’s international rugby league. The final pool match of the Women’s Rugby League World Cup sent Australia into a semi-final against Fiji with the record book rewritten in almost every column that matters.
The margin was 118 points. Australia scored 21 tries, led 60-0 at halftime, and still found room for the one Welsh moment the crowd in Parramatta will remember almost as clearly: a try that made Wales the first team to score a single point against the Jillaroos at this tournament.
Jillaroos 124-6 Wales: The Records That Fell
Start with the old marks, because the scale of this result only lands against them. The Jillaroos’ previous biggest win was their 92-0 victory over France at the 2022 World Cup, a record that survived four years and fell by 26 points on Sunday. The heaviest victory in the history of the international women’s game was France’s 116-0 win over Serbia in 2023, a 116-point margin that Australia passed at 118. The tally also eclipsed the Australian men’s World Cup record win, the Kangaroos’ 110-4 result against Russia at the 2000 World Cup, which had stood for 26 years as the biggest score by any Australian side at a World Cup, in the men’s game or the women’s.
The halftime score carried a record of its own. Australia’s 60-0 lead at the break was the biggest halftime score in Rugby League World Cup history, built on 10 first-half tries and, according to the NRL match report, 84 per cent of possession across the opening period. AAP reported that the opening three tries, from Olivia Kernick and then two from Jaime Chapman inside the first 10 minutes, were all scored before Wales had a single possession of the ball. Once a game starts that way, the question stops being who wins and becomes how far the number runs.
Chapman Scores Six, Southwell Scores 44
Jaime Chapman finished with six tries, a double hat-trick that equalled the record for most tries in a game for the Jillaroos and earned her player of the match honours. Jess Sergis crossed four times, and Keilee Joseph, Abbi Church and Tamika Upton each scored doubles, Joseph adding 226 run metres in a 38-minute stint off the bench. Kernick, Jesse Southwell, Kezie Apps, Sariah Paki and Keeley Nizza scored a try each to complete the 21.
Southwell’s day may be the most complete individual line of the afternoon. On her Test debut as Australia’s halfback, she landed 20 conversions from 21 attempts and added a try of her own for 44 points, a new Jillaroos record for points in a match. That total finished just two points short of Ryan Girdler’s Australian record of 46, set against Russia at the 2000 World Cup, the same match whose team record the Jillaroos passed on Sunday. The Rugby League World Cup’s own account kept its reaction short during the run: “The skill of this Jillaroos side is OUTRAGEOUS!”
The team numbers explain why Wales could not slow any of it down. Reporting on the match put Chapman and Sergis at 241 run metres apiece, more than the entire Welsh side managed between them, and credited Australia with 23 line breaks to none for Wales. The Jillaroos missed, by one count, a single tackle all afternoon. This is a three-time defending champion, the top-ranked team in the world, playing a Welsh side that contested its first official Test only five years ago and was playing just its 16th fixture. The gap is structural, and on Sunday it showed in full.
Wales Takes Its One Moment
For all of that, the loudest Welsh cheer of the day was earned. Late in the second half, with the score already past 100 against them, halfback Tayla Preston grubbered a kick through the Australian line and Paige Travis pounced on it to score. It was a small line on a very large scoreboard, and it mattered for two plain reasons. It was the first try, and the first points of any kind, scored against Australia at this World Cup, ending a defensive run that had included a 78-0 shutout of England in the previous round. And it gave a young Welsh programme, one still building its player base and its history, a genuine moment inside a record defeat rather than only the defeat itself.
Wales arrived at this match having already conceded heavily in the pool, including a 70-6 loss to England, and their World Cup ends here. Australia’s does not, and that difference in depth is the honest context for the scoreline. Records set against developing opposition still count in the record book, and the Jillaroos can only play the draw they are given, but the semi-final will be a different measure of this team than a pool match against a side five years into its international life.
Fiji Waits In The Semi-Final
Australia now face the Fiji Bulikula in a semi-final at Allianz Stadium in Sydney next Sunday, November 8, with a place in the November 15 final in Brisbane on the line. Coach Jess Skinner, per the NRL report, faces selection decisions after a performance in which a bench forward outran most starting packs and a debut halfback broke a national scoring record, which is the kind of problem a coach accepts gladly at this stage of a tournament.
What Sunday established, beyond the meeting with Fiji, is the new ceiling for a women’s international scoreline: 124 points scored, a 118-point margin, a 60-0 halftime lead, six tries from one winger and 44 points from one halfback, all in a single World Cup match on November 1, 2026. The next side that chases any of those marks now knows exactly how high the bar sits, because the Jillaroos just put it there.
