We bought our strips with a Provident cheque .... and arrived for the game in the back of a furniture van
50 YEARS ON, THE AMAZING STORY OF THE FIRST WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL MATCH HELD IN SCOTLAND
THERE is no blue plaque on the wall of Ravenscraig Stadium. On a humdrum Thursday morning in Inverclyde, parents grapple with toddlers as they shuffle in and out of the activity centre next door.
The locals seem oblivious to the fact that the home of Greenock Juniors played host to a little piece of footballing history 50 years ago.
The first women’s football international on Scottish soil was a low-budget affair. Of the 32 national associations ordered to open their minds to women’s football by Europe’s governing body UEFA in 1971, only one resisted. The Scottish FA remained the last bastion of male chauvinism.
Despite the tea and sympathy offered by SFA office-bearers Willie Allan and Ernie Walker to Elsie Cook, honorary secretary of the newly formed Scottish Women’s Football Association, the walls of the old SFA headquarters at Park Gardens proved an impenetrable mix of concrete and misogyny.
So it was then that Cook — the original trailblazer for women’s football in Scotland — joined forces with English counterpart Pat Gregory and mustered the spirit of the Suffragettes. A century to the month after the men’s teams met in Glasgow for the first time, the women of Scotland and England finally followed suit in 1972.
‘That’s why the game was played at Ravenscraig,’ Cook tells Sportsmail. ‘It wasn’t an SFA-approved pitch.
‘We were banned from hiring an SFA referee as well. It was Jimmy Cleland, a referee from the Renfrewshire Referees’ Association, who had to take the game.
‘The fact is that we were the poor relations. We had nothing.
‘The girls were told to meet at the old Anderston bus station in Glasgow. The minibus never arrived, so I stopped this furniture van and asked the driver if he could take us to Greenock.
‘We were sitting on the sofas and the other bits of furniture all the way down.
‘England came up in a posh bus and had all their gear and bags embroidered with “England” on them.
‘Us? We bought the Scotland strips with a Provident cheque and I bought the badges and the numbers myself.
‘We wanted the lassies to be proud of representing their country and my mother was a stitcher in the Robert Mackie factory in Stewarton that made all the tartan tammies.
‘So she took the numbers in to get the women in the factory to sew the badges on and I sewed the numbers on by hand.’
Where Celtic and Rangers now take the task of challenging Glasgow City’s dominance seriously, the world of women’s football was a rather different place in 1972.
In 1961, Cook had founded Stewarton Thistle after the town provost asked her mother to get the ‘netball lassies’ to play a game of football against an East Kilbride team called Holyrood Bumbees in a charity match for Ethiopia.
Stewarton won 7-1 thanks to Susan Ferris lashing in all seven goals. When the teams posed for photos, a little girl by the name of Rose Reilly asked if she could get a game next time.
At the age of nine, her first game came against the wonderfully named Red Rockets of Johnstone and, by 1972, a meeting was called in Edinburgh to form an eight-club SWFA.
‘Until that association meeting was called, we had no infrastructure in Scotland,’ says Cook. ‘England were far more advanced than us. We had eight teams in Scotland, they had 270.’
Cook played for Stewarton Thistle in the first English FA Cup final against Southampton. Scotland took a little longer to get its act together.
‘At times it felt like banging your head off the wall,’ she recalls.
‘Before the SFWA were established, I used to phone the old SFA secretary Ernie Walker every other blooming week and ask: “Why can we not get the pitches and the referees”?
‘We felt we were not authentic if we couldn’t use authentic venues and officials.
‘He wasn’t interested. He was always very pleasant, but he wasn’t interested.
‘When the association started up, I went to see the president Willie Allan and he was unbelievable. Rooted in the dark ages.
‘He was gentlemanly enough. I got to the old SFA HQ at Park Gardens and he met me at the door and said: “In you come” and he pulled a chair out for me in the office. He said to me: “Right, Elsie, tell me your story”.
‘So I started by asking why could we not get the pitches? Why could we not get referees?
‘The minute I started pleading my case I could see him just sitting shaking his head.’
A women’s World Cup winner with Italy in 1984, Rose Reilly MBE is now footballing aristocracy. In November 1972 she was the 17-year-old from Kilmarnock who scored direct from a corner to put Scotland 2-0 ahead in freezing cold conditions in that first international in Greenock.
‘There were only a couple of hundred fans,’ recalls Cook. ‘You have to remember that we were still being ostracised.
‘The only advertising for the game was in the Greenock Telegraph. Nobody else was interested.
‘Mary Carr was the size of tuppence and scored the first goal after 24 minutes with a brilliant diving header after a brilliant pass from Edna Nellis.
‘That was followed by a direct corner from Rose. Sue Buckett of England is one of the best goalkeepers I’ve ever seen, but it caught the far post and went in.
‘Sylvia Gore broke through on a brick-hard pitch and scored to make it 2-1 before half-time.’
Accounts differ on who scored England’s second and third goals. Fifa.com register the scorers as Lynda Hale and Jeannie Allott. Beyond dispute is the fact that England won 3-2.
‘We lost two late goals in the last ten minutes,’ says Cook. ‘But the result itself was nothing compared to what the game meant.’
To commemorate the pioneers of 1972, Elsie will return to Ravenscraig Stadium together with Rose Reilly, Greenock-born Marion Mount and goalkeeper Sandra Walker on Sunday.
In a game organised by Inverclyde Council, the Scottish Schools Under-15 team will face their English counterparts at mid-day, with World Cup winner Reilly scheduled to do a question and answer session with the young players the night before.
‘It can still make me emotional thinking about what we did all those years ago,’ says Cook now. ‘We did no’ bad, eh?’
Tickets are now on sale for the match at £5 per adult ticket, with up to two Under-16s included in the ticket price.