Western Daily Press (Saturday)
Clubs set for reality check
Sports editor Keith Watson considers the grand plans some relatively big names in the region have for women’s football
WHAT an exciting time for women’s football in Gloucestershire. Hot on the heels of Forest Green Rovers announcing steps to “greater compete in women’s football”, a new women’s section has been launched by Gloucester City as part of the owners’ new Gloucester Sport venture.
But hang on a minute. Haven’t City been in the Gloucestershire County Women’s League for a couple of decades? And, more importantly, did Mrs Watson merely imagine scoring a match-winning cup final hat-trick against the Tigers for Cam Bulldogs in 2003?
Time for some context. City of Gloucester Ladies were founded in 1997 and soon changed their name to Gloucester City. Like many teams in the women’s game, they played under the name of their equivalent men’s team and at times shared their ground without fully amalgamating.
However, having been approached about a merger by the current men’s operation in recent months, the women’s club rejected the offer and will now revert to their original City of Gloucester name, while a Gloucester City Women’s team has now been kicked off under the Gloucester Sport umbrella.
Just to add to the confusion, the longstanding club and their youth teams had joined Gloucester City men in switching to a red and yellow kit a few seasons back, sponsored by Gloucester Sport’s Alex Petheram and Eamonn McGurk no less, but will now go back to their original yellow and black look amid a rebranding.
Gloucester Sport say “community engagement” is a key pillar of their plan, but have immediately pitted themselves against a club that has served young people in the city for more than 20 years. One wonders how hard they tried to engage here?
A little like Forest Green’s grand vision, this appears to be what happens when non-women’s football people wade into women’s football, especially at grassroots level.
Having watched and assisted in grassroots women’s football for over 15 years, one fundamental question screams at me when I hear that both Gloucester City and Forest Green, in their case with a reserve team, want to launch new teams in the County League. Without existing youth teams, where are these players coming from?
City of Gloucester, Abbeymead, Longlevens and Tuffley all play in the city and are not exactly overwhelmed with players. Looking a little further afield, nor are Cotswold Rangers, Cirencester, Mitcheldean, Dursley, Cheltenham Civil Service, Ellwood or Winchcombe. And there are not loads of ‘inactive’ players sat at home waiting for a game.
Perhaps a group will move en bloc from one of these clubs, causing their old team to fold, which is hardly “community engagement”. More likely, in Gloucester’s case, players may be attracted by the new stadium or the lack of fees for training, matches or signing-on, but how good these players prove to be is a lottery.
People running football clubs at non-League level, and this applies to both men’s and women’s teams, can get very uppity about how their operation is superior to a rival, especially when facilities and league status are concerned, but success ultimately comes down to who is representing them on the pitch.
Women’s football appears to have a habit of putting perceived status above actual achievement – witness in recent years Manchester United starting at Championship level, Doncaster Belles and Sunderland being denied top-flight status off the pitch, and the current farce that is the reorganisation of the Welsh top tier. The suspicion among players at more grassroots clubs is that players who move to ‘big name’ sides do so because they think a bit much of themselves.
And if we consider that the men’s game has around 20 tiers from the Premier League down, and the women’s pyramid has nine, roughly one for every two in the men’s game, then County League women’s players are equivalent Stroud League men’s players, and absolutely noone is suggesting that most male players of that standard ought to be strutting their stuff anywhere other than their local park pitches.
Consider too that players good enough to get out of Division Three of the women’s County League will not be the same ones required to thrive in the South West League, and that one club completely overhauled their team a couple of seasons ago because they deemed the struggling players “an embarrassment”.
As an advocate of women’s football in Gloucestershire, it would be good to see Forest Green or Gloucester, or indeed Cheltenham or any of the other long-established outfits, reach the upper echelons of the game in time, but these teams have a long road in front of them and I fear the reality of this journey has yet to dawn on them.