LACKLUSTRE SFA LETTING DOWN WOMEN’S FOOTBALL
SHELLEY KERR and Erin Cuthbert have bemoaned the lack of progress women’s football has made since last summer’s World Cup.
Kerr, the national coach, makes mention of a lack of visibility in newspapers. Cuthbert, Scotland’s brightest talent, refers to people complaining about what does make the back pages instead.
This is all very well. When figuring out why the profile of the women’s game has fallen off the face of a cliff, though, there needs to be greater analysis of their own national association, too.
The SFA knew they’d have a wedge of cash — an estimated £400,000 — lying around after the World Cup from the moment the team qualified in September 2018. By the time Glasgow City had won their 13th straight domestic title on a council-run potato field with no seating or shelter 13 months later, there was still no plan in place for the use of it.
Who knows what progress in designing a strategy has been made since?
One thing seems certain. Glasgow City would have been unable to travel to the neutral venue of San Sebastian to meet Wolfsburg in the last eight of the Champions League next month had the venerable James Anderson, saviour of all and sundry, not offered to cover the costs.
‘The stark reality is if James hadn’t come forward, then I don’t know how we could ever have played this game,’ conceded club manager Laura Montgomery.
City are in the quarter-finals with Barcelona, Paris Saint-Germain, Bayern Munich, Atletico Madrid, Arsenal and Lyon. It is a remarkable achievement.
Yet, what does it say about the way the women’s game is run that it appears to have taken a philanthropic bailout from an external party to allow them, these eternal torchbearers, to carry on competing. As previously discussed on this page,
Sportsmail approached City before their first Champions League tie against Russian side Chertanovo last October with a view to carrying an in-depth profile piece on goalkeeper Lee Alexander, a continuation of the buzz built up by the national team’s rollercoaster tournament in France.
City said the interview would have to be run past the SFA if there was any desire to revisit Alexander’s involvement in the World Cup. We called the SFA and were pretty much told, without the player being asked, that it was unlikely to happen.
Someone would ring us back with a definite answer, they promised. No one ever did.
That’s what you’re dealing with. That’s why the train has long since left the station without anyone jumping on board.
It’s something Kerr, Cuthbert and others ought to address as they identify exactly why the women’s game in Scotland is stuck in the slow lane.