When Dick Kerr's Ladies' soccer team from Preston set off on a tour of the United States in 1922 they were regarded as a bit of a freak show, attracting sizeable if bemused crowds at their games against all-male teams in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New York and Maryland.
(Incidentally, they won three, drew three and lost just two of their matches. Some newspaper reports accused the defeated men of letting the "Ladies" win. . . yeah, right).
What the same women would have made of the Matildas, Super Falcons and Black Queens 77 years on one can only imagine, but they'd probably have been impressed, and might even have wished they were born a few generations later so they too could have played on the same world stage.
Australia, Nigeria and Ghana are three of the 15 nations that have followed the pioneering path of Dick Kerr's Ladies to the United States by qualifying for the third women's World Cup, which gets under way today when the hosts, Team USA, play Denmark at the Giants Stadium in New Jersey.
Norway (the World Cup holders), Canada, Russia, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Italy, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, China, Japan, Brazil and Mexico complete the line-up for the tournament, which ends on July 10th at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, the venue for the final. "The 1999 FIFA Women's World Cup is not a simple sporting event - it is a moment in time to mark the momentous changes in the lives of girls of the past generation and set the sights for those to come," claims FIFA's press release for the tournament.
Okay, it sounds like it's been penned by Whitney Houston's lyricist, but it's right, there have been "momentous changes" in the lives of female footballers since the days of Dick Kerr's Ladies.
They certainly weren't the first women to play the game - in the book Nike is a Goddess, Elise Pettus claims: "China has a history of women's soccer dating back to the Tang and Song dynasties (600-1300 AD)" - but they were the most successful team to emerge in England during the first World War when there was a boom in the women's game, with up to 150 teams in existence by 1921. Most of the teams were made up of women working in munitions factories during the war ("Dick Kerr" was one such weapons plant in Preston), who occupied their breaks by kicking a ball around the factory yard, just as their fathers, brothers and husbands had done before they went to war.
Matches were arranged between the factory teams to raise funds for war charities and one such game, between Dick Kerr's and St Helen's Ladies on St Stephen's Day in 1920, attracted a crowd of 53,000 at Goodison Park, with another 8,000 locked outside. Soon companies began offering jobs on their assembly lines to talented footballers, the 1920's equivalent of the transfer bung.
The English Football Association welcomed the funds raised by these matches but when, by 1921, some women's games were attracting bigger crowds than many lower league men's matches they banned women from playing on Football League grounds. This, of course, had nothing to do with them not getting their slice of the sizeable gate receipts, rather, according to their statement at the time, it was because they were of "the strong opinion that the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and should not be encouraged". By the time Dick Kerr's Ladies returned from their tour of the US the women's game had all but died in England as a result of the FA ban and it wasn't until 1972 that the ban was lifted by the association, under pressure from UEFA. Since then there has been a remarkable growth in the women's game in England - in 1990 there were 80 adult female teams, there are now over 1,000 - and the boom has been mirrored worldwide, not least in Ireland.
"Not so long ago I'd name 12 players for the senior squad and then have to ring up another four to ask them to play," said Irish manager Mick Cooke recently. "We have players now, in the youth and senior squads, from Kerry, Donegal, Waterford, Cork, Athlone and Boyle - a couple of years ago they really only came from Dublin, so the game is taking off all over the country." Ireland missed out on qualification for the World Cup, finishing second in their group behind Poland (who went on to lose their qualification play-off), but with the improvement in the standard of women's club football here and with five of the current senior squad now playing abroad, some with semi-professional clubs, the future looks promising.
Irish internationals Carol Conlon and Ciara Grant joined Arsenal (last season's FA and League Cup winners) last year while goalkeeper Emma Byrne and Grainne Kierans are with Fortuna in Denmark and Holly Pearce, the American-born forward who made her Irish debut last month, plays with German club FSV Frankfurt.
None is quite in the £30,000-a-week earning bracket, but they're gaining invaluable experience.
They probably all aspire to match the achievements of the star of today's women's game, American striker Mia Hamm, one of the first to win a contract with a major sports manufacture (you might spot her Nike Air Zoom M9 boots in your local store) and who also appeared in a commercial for the drink Gatorade with Michael Jordan.
Fitness permitting, Hamm, who broke the world record for international goals when she scored her 108th against Brazil in May, will line out for the USA against Denmark this evening (live on Eurosport at 8.0) in front of an expected capacity 77,000 crowd at the Giants Stadium. Close to half a million tickets have been sold already for the 32-game tournament, the biggest women's only sporting event in history, and a worldwide television audience of one billion in 70 countries is anticipated. What, you have to wonder, would Dick Kerr's Ladies have made of it all?
