The tone is somewhere between genuinely affronted and tickled pink. “Give it our all ?” Cardiff City Ladies FC chairwoman and former Wales international Michele Adams MBE laughs from the other end of the telephone. It is three days before Cardiff City Ladies host Portishead Town Ladies FC in the first match of the 2022/23 season, a season which will be played out in the FA National League’s fourth tier Division South West after the club’s shock relegation in the previous campaign.
“Come on now, ‘give it our all’," Adams laughs again with faux contempt. “We’re there to win. No one remembers second, do they? Come on, we’re there to win!”
By goal number five (and a third for Cardiff City LFC’s Emily Sargent to seal an audacious first-half hat-trick in all of seven minutes), that much is clear. On a scorching Sunday afternoon, Caerau Ely’s Cwrt-yr-Ala Ground is Cardiff City LFC’s own personal playground.
New manager Jamie Phillip warned as much. “To win,” was his response, along with a cheeky grin, when asked pre-match about his preferred style. “We’ve worked on new positions, new combinations. We over-analyse sometimes, but this year we’ve tried to make sure we can be as dangerous as possible in the final third.” He smiles modestly, before adding: “So lots of goals.”
Final score: Cardiff City LFC 7-1 Portishead Town LFC.
New Season, New Identity . That’s the slogan Cardiff City LFC have selected for what they are coining their promotion campaign, one with the ultimate ambition of returning to the English Championship after a difficult near decade outside of it.
The pithy four-worder is simple yet poised without sounding cavalier towards the challenge ahead. Encompassed within it are 10 months of introspection and rebuilding from the top-down after a torrid 18 months which culminated in relegation from the Southern Premier Division.
“The rebrand was a fresh coat of paint,” Adams explains. “Relegation made us take a good hard look at ourselves inside and out. We increased the number of people at the committee levels. We looked at ourselves on all moving grounds, saying let’s look at things in a different light, not feel sorry for ourselves. Let’s go out and promote ourselves as the club that we really are.”
A meticulously-prepared to-do list characterises the rebrand, from training on different surfaces during pre-season to installing intensive conditioning standards mimicking Super League-led GPS data, which sees many of the players hitting 100km per month.
"They’ll appreciate it when the season gets going,” Phillip smiles when asked if the players have taken kindly to the new rigours. There are new player-production strategies, FA Cup plans and sponsorship work, all bolstering the long-term vision of returning to the Championship, England's second tier. Beyond that takes the "mega-mega bucks”, Adams concedes.
Yet, exactly whom Cardiff City LFC are – and more importantly, whom others have come to believe they are – sits at the crux of it all. “People were starting to say about us that we were a club of the past, and we didn’t like that,” Adams says. “We didn’t see ourselves as the club of the past. We saw ourselves as a club that was having a difficult season. Even if we had stayed up, we realised we weren’t the club we were.”
A rich history surges through the roots of Cardiff City LFC. They are “Wales’ most successful women’s team”, as their Twitter bio proudly proclaims, and are not to be confused with the Bluebirds-affiliated Cardiff City Women.
The claim is not so much a boast as a matter of fact. There are the 11 Welsh Cups won, 13 Welsh Cup finals attended, six European campaigns, a list of alumni which reads like a shortlist of Wales’ most elite international starpower – Jess Fishlock, Sophie Ingle, Loren Dykes, Kayleigh Green, Gwennan Harries, Kath Morgan. Adams also points to Cardiff City Ladies’ former position as one of the top 12 teams in the English system.
“That’s not going to happen again in Wales,” she says.
Yet, it would be remiss not to note that Cardiff City LFC’s success has tapered off, in no small part to circumstances beyond their control. With the advent of the Women's Super League and WSL2, the FA relegated Cardiff City LFC to the third division without a ball kicked, citing that a foreign club couldn’t compete in the league’s nascent stages.
For 10 years, Cardiff City LFC fought a “glass ceiling”, as Adams calls it, which denied the club any promotion potential until two and a half years ago. For those 10 years, it was a matter of “keeping one’s head above water”, as Adams says, while vying to keep hold of whatever talent they could in the hope of smashing through when possible.
Yet, when the opportunity finally arose, Cardiff City LFC’s big guns were gone, and they fell behind in costs. Covid-19 heaved the final nail. The club folded their reserves and rested their junior sides in a bid to keep their first team competing amid financial pressures. Disparate travel and quarantine guidelines between the UK and Welsh governments left them with a depleted squad, or at times, no squad at all. The penalties and fines ratcheted up.
“We were vulnerable and other teams took advantage of us, so it’s been a really difficult two years,” says Adams.
Adams and Cardiff City LFC do not feel sorry for themselves. But the club felt a particular pride as a Welsh club competing at England’s top level, and there is no denying the sense of burning injustice still kindling under the surface from the events of the last decade.
Yet, there exists a faint but critical line demarcating a desire for revenge and a desire for personal vindication, and those tempted to view Cardiff City LFC as suffering an identity crisis in the wake of a new era of football would be mistaken. This is a project of identity reclamation more than anything.
“I think it is making us angry again, that people are saying we are a team of the past,” Adams says. “We don’t consider ourselves that. We consider ourselves as the best women’s team in Wales, and that’s what we are.”
They are bold words, but Cardiff City LFC are ready to be bold. Off the pitch, they have judiciously revived their board with high-profile individuals across the political, business and sport gamut with the prerequisite they are invested in the long-term project, while continuing their tradition of elite player production with new three year and five-year strategies beginning with a new under-13s side while shelving the reserves.
New management, however, has been key. Phillip called the club inquiring about the role with little idea of the of the project at hand, but he has injected new energy, blood and standards into the squad while helping to reinvigorate the camaraderie which long defined the club.
“As a personal goal for us, we just want to be the best we possibly can be,” Phillip says. “I understand we have to be realistic at the same time in terms of where we are right now, but we want to make the standards as hard and high as possible.”
Those standards were on full display against Portishead. Cardiff City LFC were clinical and dominant, splitting defensive lines and combining sweetly to produce a swashbuckling display, underpinned by Sargent’s merciless runs and dynamism.
It is the kind of football that Adams believes will entice larger crowds. Sunday brought roughly 100 fans but Adams hopes that number can tip 500 by the season’s end, an ambitious goal, albeit only 13% of their Twitter following.
Style and success will play a part in the numbers, but Adams says their success is also integral to growing Wales’ overall game. Until the calibre of women’s football increases ubiquitously across the country, Adams says it is imperative that a Welsh club competes at a top level.
“We have the opportunity to have a Championship club in Wales instead of sending our better players to England all the time,” Adams says. “Why are we doing that? Why are we making the English clubs better? We can work and get a Welsh club in the Championship. Yeah, your Ingles and Fishlocks will go on to bigger and better things but certainly at Championship level Wales can afford to do that as a club and a national governing body.”
There is always a risk in outright titling a campaign one of promotion. This is not the first time Cardiff City LFC find themselves in the fourth tier, though it is the first time after such unparalleled success. Yet it is that history which fuels their resolve.
“We never lost our faith. Player-wise and behind the scenes, we still believed in ourselves,” Adams says. “People have good days and bad days and last year was a bad day. But that’s it, end of story. We’ve backed ourselves and we’re going forward now.”
The comment is in keeping with Adams’ character. Fearlessly assured and matter-of-fact, her assurance is not in isolation. So, too, is it espoused by Phillip and the players. It is contagious. It is part of Cardiff City LFC’s new season, and their new identity.
