The sooner Fallon stops making headlines, the better
SOME DAY it won’t be news at all. But until that blissful pass, the career development of Lisa Fallon remains a very big deal. It is important for women in sport, but it is important for Irish sport and for Irish life generally.
This is a woman thriving in a man’s world, and until fairness of opportunity becomes so worked into Irish sport that a woman excelling in traditionally male roles goes unnoticed, it equates to news.
And it is good news, too. A colleague noted one radio bulletin announcing Fallon’s appointment as first-team head coach at Galway United, with an emphasis on the depth of coaching experience and breadth of qualifications she brings to the role.
It was as if the shock that a woman was appointed to a big job at a significant name in Irish domestic soccer had to be given immediate context: yes, she’s a woman, but we can explain.
There isn’t the same qualifier when, say, a man retires from playing and is quickly progressed into coaching, given an important role on the strength of a name made playing the game, not teaching it.
‘HER SKILL IN PICKING A GAME APART IS NOT CONFINED TO SOCCER’
This should not be construed as a howl of protest against the old boys’ club; business has been done a certain way for decades in sport.
It is only when an outlier like Lisa Fallon works her way into focus that it becomes apparent.
It is also worth noting that Fallon herself has spoken in the past of being a woman in a man’s world, and despite the challenges, she has not been distracted by them or been sidelined by them.
She has simply got on with improving, first as a player, then as an analyst and currently as an elite soccer coach.
Her skills in picking apart a game are not confined to one code. She worked under Jim Gavin on part of Dublin’s charge to five in a row.
It was in an earlier life as a journalist that an important opportunity emerged, one that would eventually lead her to scouting Germany and working as part of the Northern Ireland team that reached Euro 2016.
The manager who led them there was Michael O’Neill, but when he was at Shamrock Rovers he was struck by the insight of Fallon’s questions.
That led to him asking her to do some work with Rovers, and from there she worked her way to being part of the North’s terrific run to the European Championships.
John Caulfield is the current Galway manager, and in choosing Fallon to lead his coaching team he is returning to a talent that thrived under his management at Cork
City. Fallon was one of Caulfield’s first-team coaches there, part of a group that won the domestic double in 2017, as well as the FAI Cup in 2016.
Then she went to England – where she had played before injury interrupted that career – and time at Chelsea. Last May, she was made the head coach of the London City Lionesses, but she left the position in October.
She had been commuting between her home in Dublin and London, and the complications wrought by Covid-19 on all parts of life led her to make a decision that must have
been momentous. As she explained in a tweet after her departure, ‘I love the game, but this time, in these circumstances, it has to be family first’.
The pandemic continues to cause havoc and the domestic soccer schedule looks certain to be in a state of flux for some time yet, after a weekend that brought the dread prospect of weeks more of lockdown.
One of the more baleful impacts of this wretched year has been on women in sport.
It is a movement that has been transformed in Ireland over the past decade, partly because of organised efforts like the 20x20 campaign, but also because brilliant individuals and teams have started to receive the recognition that was denied their predecessors for generations.
An imposing amount of work remains to be done before women’s sport is accorded the respect its male equivalents receive unthinkingly.
So be it. One of the indisputable triumphs of 20x20, for instance, was in telling stories that can’t be untold; the gripping testimony of people that devote as much of themselves to their sport as any man, caught the public’s imagination.
Effort and application are not gender-specific. Neither are talent, nor ambition.
The unfolding story of a coach like Lisa Fallon hints at the way Irish sport will be utterly transformed when the gifts of half the population are fully realised.