‘Times are changing in the women’s game and I do feel like I’m in the right place moving forward’
Wales’ women footballers face the first of their post-lockdown Euro qualifiers this month. Team star Angharad James spoke to sports writer Katie Sands about her career, drive and ambition
IF THERE’S one saying that Angharad James lives by, it’s that everything happens for a reason. The Wales and Reading midfield maestro has endured her fair share of setbacks on her way to becoming a full-time professional footballer in England’s top flight with Reading, with whom she begins the new Women’s Super League season this weekend.
But it’s a good thing the 26-yearold from Pembrokeshire doesn’t rest easy in her comfort zone – the exArsenal academy product is always hungry for more, and has the knack for turning a setback into an opportunity.
An enthusiastic rugby player in her youth, she always enjoyed football but it only became a priority when she wasn’t able to play rugby with boys anymore from the age of 13.
Around the age of 14, it was a friend’s bittersweet invitation to apply for Arsenal Women’s academy which would see her take the leap and move away from home straight after her GCSEs.
“I played for Manorbier. My friend came in one day and she said to me, ‘I’m going to go and trial for Arsenal, do you fancy it?’,”she explains.
“I just thought nothing about it. My dad said, ‘Well if she’s going, you may as well go’.
“I applied for it online and ended up going to the trial. Bittersweet, really, I got through in the end and she didn’t.
“We both just laugh about it now because it was meant to be – without that little thing, it might never have happened.”
Even from day one, there was always a setback of some sort; she received a letter to inform her she had not been successful.
“I think I was 14 going on 15 and ended up going to three or four trials.
“One of the best things about it – I didn’t realise it at the time – was I never initially got a place, I was put on standby.
“I think over 150 applied, they narrowed it down and I ended up being in the 25 but they only took 20.”
Luckily, a space opened up for the young Welsh teenager after a dropout, and James got the chance to go and chase her dream in 2010, but the drive it must have taken to leave everything you knew aged 15 isn’t to be sniffed at.
“Having to move away from Pembrokeshire, where we had to travel half an hour to get to a supermarket, to moving up to London and being amongst everything, it was a difficult decision and at that time it was leaving friends and family behind to go and chase a dream of becoming a professional.
“At a young age I didn’t know that female footballers could be professional and do it as a full-time job. It was a bit alien to me.
“I knew I had to do it. I knew I probably wouldn’t have got that opportunity again.
“But I couldn’t sit here and say I didn’t struggle. After the second week, I was ringing my mum and dad saying I wanted to come home and pack it all in. They kept on. As weeks went by, things got a lot easier.”
That life-changing two-year period she spent with the Gunners will go down as the best two years of her life due to the fact she learnt so much about herself.
“The opportunities I got with Arsenal, I travelled to Japan with the first team with Laura Harvey on tour, I was in the Champions League squad. The experiences I got from being at the club were amazing and ones that I will treasure forever.
“At the time, I didn’t appreciate it, but now looking back it’s really put me where I am today and I luckily got the move to Bristol and became full-time after Arsenal.
“The times I look back, I think I’m so glad I did follow through with it and make the move.”
James went on to make her first team debut in a 6–0 home win in the Uefa Women’s Champions League in October 2011, just a year after joining the academy.
The club is where she first met Jayne Ludlow, Arsenal Women’s record goal-scorer and now Wales manager – someone both Ludlow herself and James describe as a “psycho” during her time as a player.
“I didn’t know too much about her at the time”, James recalls. “And then instantly she just became my role model. She was a centre midfielder there, she dictated play, you could see her passion, as you can see now as a manager. She was exactly the same as a player.”
At the club at the opposite ends of their careers, Ludlow and James now enjoy a player-manager relationship as Wales Women resume their European Championship qualifying campaign against Norway on September 22.
But it was very different back in London a decade ago.
“Haz came in and joined us, I had a mixed role with Haz”, Ludlow explains. “I was there as a person to look after her day to day on the academy site, I was a physio but I was also a teammate as she started progressing.
“It was interesting, her time there. When she came, we were under different management and she wasn’t really getting a look-in. She went through a period of the head coach at one point didn’t see much in her but then the next one did and she had opportunities.”
James was faced with a crossroads when told by manager Laura Harvey that she wasn’t ready for first-team football, and she was given the choice to stay or leave.
“Laura Harvey sat me down and she said, ‘You’re a player we want to keep hold of, and you’re a player we do see in the future that we feel you could be beneficial to the team’.
“At that point, she said, ‘It’s your decision from now on, we’re happy for you to stay at the club but you’re not ready yet, you’re at the point where you’re probably going to be a squad player, maybe if there are injuries you might be on the bench, or I’ve got a team that’s interested in you to play week in, week out’.
“It was a hard decision for me, in my heart I wanted to stay at Arsenal. It was a club I’d been at for two years and it was one of the biggest women’s clubs in the world.
“She said, ‘Go out and get game time, you’re young, and that’s the
The opportunities I got with Arsenal were amazing ones that I will treasure forever ANGHARAD JAMES
way we can bring you back in a year or two years when we think you might be ready to be in the team’.”
Heading to Bristol on loan, that was the last conversation James had with anyone at Arsenal, with Harvey later moving to America to manage in the States.
“I never had contact with the club again. After the two years were up at Bristol, they then signed me after my loan so I stayed with them.
“I’ve never actually spoken to the club since, which is disappointing for me because I loved the club. They gave me so many experiences there that I can’t thank them enough for, and Harvs did, and the other managers as well.
“Whenever I play them I want to play well, I want to beat them, I want to try and prove a point a little bit, but I always look back at that time and I’m just happy when I look back and I think how much fun I had there and how much I improved as a player, all the players I was surrounded by on a daily basis, they just got the best out of me.”
Ludlow adds: “I’m glad she chose the route she did to get first-team football at a young age.
“She’s one of the ones who proves it’s been the right thing to do. She might have had opportunities to stay with a bigger club at the time and sit on the bench and that wouldn’t have been right for her, and you can see the competitive element in her that she chose not to do that.”
Spells at Notts County, Yeovil Town and Everton later followed, but it’s at Reading where James is now thriving – a move fuelled by a desire to be challenged. She said at the time of her transfer last summer: “Great things never came from comfort zones”.
James isn’t one for dwelling on the past.
“I do believe in the motto that everything happens for a reason, because I look back at my times at Bristol and we were so close to winning the league one year – it went down to the last game.
“Where I am now with Reading, I’m the happiest I’ve been within football for a few years now and they seem to be changing me as a player and a person and trying to get the best out of me.
“We’re going to be at the men’s stadium, the Madejski Stadium, which is the first women’s team to do so, and we’re going to be based at the men’s training ground now.
“Times are changing in the women’s game and I do feel like I’m in the right place moving forward with it.
“It’ll be more as one, the men’s, women’s and academy – it’ll all be looked at as one team, and I think that’s important moving forward in women’s football that you do have the support from the men’s team.”
The fact there is something of a Welsh contingent at the Royals made the decision a little easier, with Welsh teammate Tash Harding as captain, Rachel Rowe in the ranks and Wales’ most-capped footballer Jess Fishlock also joining the squad for the new season on loan from American side OL Reign.
Kelly Chambers’ side will be bidding to kick their new season off with a bang against the Gunners this weekend, aiming to improve on their fifth-placed table finish last term.
“I just asked Tash, Rowey what it was like and they didn’t have one bad word to say about the club so it
was an easy decision. Since being there I’ve thrived, really. Each year I can feel myself improving as a player and I’m in the right environment to hopefully continue to do that.
“The Welsh girls being there, it made the move a lot easier. It’s always nice having a few Welshies around you when you’re in England!”
Of course, it will be more than just Reading fans who will be clapping their side on from a distance this weekend when England’s top flight kicks off.
Jayne Ludlow will be keen to keep a close eye on her Wales charges, with the first of their Euro qualifiers on September 22 after coronavirusenforced postponements.
Her Wales side continue their dream to make it to a first major tournament this month against World Cup quarter-finalists Norway in Oslo. Three more qualifiers – against the Faroe Islands, Norway at home and Belarus – will then follow before 2020 draws to a close, before an 18-month wait for the actual tournament after its postponement from 2021 to 2022.
“We got told pretty early with Wales that the qualifiers were very unlikely to go ahead, but now that things are up and running and we’ve got those dates to look to in the September camp.
“It’s given a lot of the players who maybe were out injured or younger players more time to come through the ranks. It’s given the likes of Hayley Ladd and Jess Fishlock, time to recover [from injury].
“If anything, it’s put us in an even better position to qualify, and speaking with the girls, all we’re looking forward to is the next game. We’re focusing now on Norway, and what a big game to come back to.
“It’s one of the best environments I’ve been in with Wales, and you can probably see that from the outside. We get on so well as a group and it’s not just little small groups within the group, anyone would do anything for anyone, and that’s the spirit we’ve had all along.”
Does she dare to dream?
“If anyone told you they weren’t, they’d be lying!
“We’ve all got it in our heads that we’re probably in the strongest position that we’ve ever been in to be able to qualify.
“The belief has always been there, I don’t think that’s ever been something that’s lacked in the group.”
But first up, it’s Arsenal v Reading and the chance to kick her club’s new season off with a bang.
The Barclays Women’s Super League’s new season – one of the most eagerly anticipated since its inception in 2010 – kicks off with newly promoted Aston Villa hosting last season’s league runners-up Manchester City at 2.30pm today.
Arsenal v Reading at Meadow Park kicks off on Sunday, September 6, at 12.30pm.
Brighton & Hove Albion v Birmingham City, Bristol City v Everton and Tottenham v West Ham all kick off on Sunday at 2pm, before Manchester United face title defenders Chelsea at 2.30pm.