‘We come here for a reason – because

Crystal Palace Ladies are not paid to play, but I soon discovered their dedication to the cause

in Bromley

Beneath the Bromley floodlights, frost glistens on the grass. It is a frigid Thursday evening, the kind of lancinating chill that gnaws at the fingers, where to breathe out is to leave a wispy footprint on the air above this pitch by a construction site.

A lack of other offers means I am spending Valentine’s Day at Bromley FC – in a portable building that, I am warned, “smells of Deep Heat” – changing into a Crystal Palace kit, about to train with Palace Ladies. “Don’t worry,” deadpans assistant coach Norbert Farkas. “We have oxygen if you need it.”

Most of us have, of course, wondered if we could have been professional footballers. My own career peaked with a trial for Leeds United aged 10 and the sense of “what if?” still rankles.

For many at Palace, a part-time club ninth in the Women’s Championship, the dream lingers. The team comprises largely of players who spent their childhoods at other clubs but came of age when the notion of a fullyprofessional tier like today’s Women’s Super League was a distant dream.

In that landscape, they faced uncertain futures and explored other avenues. None of them are paid to play for Palace. As a result, Palace’s player roster reads like a copy of the

Yellow Pages.

There are the obligatory sports coaches and personal trainers, but also a marketing consultant, a tax adviser, a health insurance worker, an accountant, two teachers, two bartenders and a chef.

Ria Collins is a postwoman for the Royal Mail – “I’ve got a watch that counts my steps and I can do 15,000 in the space of three hours” – and was on the books at Chelsea aged 17. “And then I ended up giving it up because I had to get a job and I was going to university. Life took me away from my love of football. I had seven years where I didn’t kick a ball.” Lauren-amie Allen is a nanny whose enthusiasm for a good ball pool is rarely tempered by the training sessions she must attend a few hours later.

“I do spend quite a lot of time at soft-play centres,” she says. “I completely forget I’m there for the child. I’m like, ‘Hey – come down this slide!’ I run off and do my own thing, absolutely kill myself – then get to training and realise I’ve got to do it all again.” Her joviality masks, however, a steely resolve. “I start work at 7am, finish at 6pm and then drive straight to training.” She lives in Surrey, 48 miles away. “If I am tired from football, I have more of a relaxed day with the kids – it works quite well. But it is hard. Three nights a week, I leave my house at six and don’t get home until midnight. We know the circumstances of being in this league.”

For others, the route to Palace was less conventional. Shanell Salgado moved to London from Germany 15 years ago and is now working for a charity providing housing for adults with mental illnesses. “My parents wanted me to study in London,” she says. “I wasn’t completely fluent in English and

I let my football do the talking. I communicated through sport more than anything. “With our tenants, sometimes their mental illness becomes a barrier for them. I had the language barrier – in that way, I can relate. Providing them with a home really helps them.”

Each player wants to turn fully professional but, should she get there, Salgado would “love to keep my work with the charity going part-time”.

Until then, Roy Hodgson, the Palace men’s team manager, has agreed to let the ladies team manager Dean Davenport observe his training sessions and Mark Bright, who played for the club for six years from 1986, is a regular visitor to Bromley. “We are one club and that’s the way it will stay,” Davenport says.

The kindest thing you can say about my “performance” is that

I do at least last the full two hours.

But there are reasons why this jobbing left-winger will not be terrifying Championship defences. I am still haunted by the three painful minutes we spend lumbering through cones with resistance bands binding our ankles – “you’ll literally feel like you’ve done an hour workout after that,” Collins cautions – when we start the 20-minute transition drill.

The ball pings from zone to zone with ludicrous pace. By the time you have processed the picture, the scene has changed.

The mental interrogation from the sidelines is constant: which