My latest Blog
Women’s football has made history last week with the start of the Women’s Super League (WSL), it is the first ever semi professional league in this country, something that had to happen in order for the game to progress. Women’s football is the nation’s number one female team participation sport, currently 1.38m women and girls up and down the country play the game regularly. I have played in the Women’s Premier League for the past 15 years which has always been enjoyable, however it has been dominated by the likes of Arsenal who regularly won the League cup, FA cup and the League each year. The Super League has been reduced to 8 teams which will make the League more competitive and will be played throughout the summer months so it doesn’t clash with the men’s game .Hopefully we will attract more supporters than last year where you would find one man and his dog at the games (oh and my mum!!) The WSL hopes to raise the standards of play for each individual, with Lincoln we train up to 5 times a week, this can only help us to improve our standard of football and hopefully make the game more appealing to watch. With players having competitive games and training on a regular basis with good quality coaches can only help the national set up and bring us success in the World Cup.
We have had some fantastic media coverage over the past few weeks, the girls have had various radio and TV appearances and we’ve had fantastic coverage from the local press, the best has to be Megan appearing on soccer AM, (don’t worry I won’t mention your shot it was definitely the shoes!!). Megan, Sophie and I went to Wembley for the launch of the WSL it was a great event despite having to get up at 5am, to promote our clubs there were several representatives carrying out media interviews. I have to say a few funny things happened on the day and before you say it I wasn’t involved in any of them. During lunch one of the ESPN presenters tripped on her way to the stage (I didn’t laugh promise) Sophie went on stage and apart from braking her microphone, she managed to answer all of her questions really well in front of her peers. Once the launch was wrapped up being the true professionals that we are we left Wembley and headed to Lincoln for our evening training session. Thankfully Rod was driving in his “raging bull” (this is what it says on the side of his car) Im not sure I want to know what this stands for!!
Our first game was against local rivals Doncaster Rovers Belles at Sincil Bank. We hoped for a positive start to the season and our preparations had gone really well however the first half was quite disappointing from our perspective we went 1-0 down at, Lincoln pride themselves on playing good football and at times resorted to the long ball, this may have been due to nerves and the fact that it was such a big occasion. The second half was much better and we created many chances but couldn’t convert them into goals. After such a massive hype the result was a huge let down, but from the game we have to take the positives and work on the negatives for our next match against Chelsea on Thursday. We would all like to say a massive thank you to all the supporters who came and cheered us on, hopefully we will win for you next time!!