United face acid test in first WSL Manchester derby
Tough start for Stoney’s newly promoted side More than 20,000 to watch at Etihad Stadium
To appreciate the context of the Women’s Super League’s first Manchester derby, perhaps it is necessary to hear the words of a woman whose family history vaguely suggested she would one day play in this fixture but who also would have grown up with the belief she was the only female footballer in the world had it not been for Youtube.
“My Uncle Bobby [Mcalinden] used to play football – he was actually George Best’s best man,” says Abbie Mcmanus, Manchester United’s 26-year-old centre-back. “He was an academy player at Manchester City and then he went to America when George Best did. But growing up, I didn’t see much women’s football. My role models were Rio Ferdinand, [Nemanja] Vidic, because they were what I could see on the TV.”
Mcmanus was the only girl in the local Bury boys’ league and was about 12 years from the day she would be able to call the Cliff, United’s men’s training ground until 1999, her workplace. Her brother, Scott, was on the books at Manchester United as a teenager.
Only after catching an interview with Arsenal centre-half Faye White on television did Mcmanus learn women’s football existed. Thereafter, she spent hours watching clips of White on Youtube, “but never went to watch her because it was never in the media to say where to buy tickets. It’s a lot easier for parents to take their kids to games now”.
That Mcmanus will be watched by more than 20,000 at the Etihad Stadium today proves the point; City’s women usually play at the City Football Academy, which seats 7,000.
It has been a long time coming, in more ways than one. This is the ninth edition of the WSL but its first with United. In various incarnations, the Manchester clubs have met 21 times since 1990, City winning 10 and United seven until United’s absence from the women’s game between 2005 and 2018.
Their return last summer, as the only full-time team in the part-time Women’s Championship, was long overdue.
Given their resources – and the introduction of Casey Stoney as head coach – there was always the suspicion that the ensuing Championship title race would be more of a procession … and so it proved.
United Women were barely 11 months old when they sealed promotion to the WSL with three games remaining. By that point, they had won 15 of their 17 league games with an aggregate score of 81-7.
The issue of United’s resources became an elephant in the room and rankled Stoney, who was at pains to point out she had just 72 days to pull a first team together and that, bar Siobhan Chamberlain, Amy Turner and Alex Greenwood (now at Lyon), every United player was under 25.
United’s scouting and analysis networks far outstripped anything other clubs had, and ultimately their fitness always told, but this never was all they had going for them. It is telling that they were able to beat many of the WSL sides they faced last season and gave eventual league winners Arsenal a fright along the way. Five of the Championship’s top 10 scorers were Stoney’s players.
This summer they have welcomed not only Mcmanus – who made the short journey from City – but former Wolfsburg goalkeeper Mary Earps, West Ham’s Jane Ross and World Cup finalist Jackie Groenen. Stoney’s ambition is to one day win the Champions League with United but the acid tests are still to come.
They do not come much bigger than City, a side brimming with so many England World Cup stars that their goalkeeper, Ellie Roebuck, can recall being lost for words on her first day in their company.
“I was so star-struck, because all the girls had just come back off an incredible World Cup, and it was madness,” she says. “I went up to the canteen with my dad and they were all there. It was so weird because they’d just got a bronze medal – an unbelievable achievement – but they were just so normal.”
The absence of City goalkeeper Karen Bardsley will not be so keenly felt, given Roebuck commanded the starting shirt for half of last season. However, Ellen White’s will be and her early knee injury – she may not feature until November – exacerbates the departure of Nikita Parris to Lyon.
The form of a firing White and Georgia Stanway will define the legitimacy of City’s title aspirations; for United, today is the first test of whether they belong among the elite.