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Liverpool Echo
Liverpool Echo
Sport
Beth Lindop

Shanice van de Sanden injury proves Matt Beard point after Liverpool postponement chaos

Matt Beard cut a frustrated figure as he spoke to the media following his side's abandoned Women's Super League encounter with Chelsea last Sunday.

And the Liverpool boss had good reason to be aggrieved. Ahead of kick-off, he had relayed his players' pretty damning assessment of the pitch to the referee, while the Reds' managing director, Russ Fraser, had also sent an email to the FA to voice the club's concerns about the conditions at Kingsmeadow.

A pitch inspection had taken place at 9.30am that morning, at which point the pitch was deemed unplayable by referee Neil Hair, however that decision was reversed ahead of the warm-up, following a further inspection and the use of heaters and pitch covers. And so the game kicked off as planned - live at 12.30pm on BBC Two.

READ MORE: Liverpool Women offer free travel for fans heading to Chelsea for FA Cup tie

READ MORE: Everton boss Brian Sorensen calls on clubs to 'do better' after WSL postponement chaos

After six minutes - during which there were no less than seven instances of players slipping on the icy turf - the referee took the decision to halt play and abandon the match in the interests of player safety. It was a sequence of events that sent ripples of outrage through the women's football community, with both Beard and Chelsea manager Emma Hayes criticising the decision to allow the game to ahead, and a host of high-profile female players calling for a greater level of professionalism in the women's game.

The situation was perhaps most potently summarised by former England and Brighton boss Hope Powell, who lambasted the happenings at Kingsmeadow as "very embarrassing" and "not a good look" for the WSL. She was right.

Sunday's events cast a grim shadow over a season that has so far done so much to raise the profile of the women's game. The WSL has seen its average attendance up 227% on last term, with Arsenal's emphatic victory over Tottenham in September's North London derby drawing a league-record 47,367 fans to the Emirates.

But, while the standard of football on show is perhaps at a higher level than ever before, many of the decisions off the pitch continue to perpetuate the notion that women's football is a lesser, subsidiary companion to the men's game. A sheepish younger child that daren't encroach too much on the territory of its boisterous, all-consuming older sibling.

Liverpool's clash with Chelsea was one of three WSL matches to be called off due to the weather last weekend, meaning just half of the league's fixtures went ahead as planned, while a flurry of postponements before Christmas has already left a number of rescheduled games needing to be slotted in in the second half of the season.

There were numerous solutions put forward in the aftermath of Sunday's game to help combat such amateurish last-minute postponements, with calls for undersoil heating, better forward-planning and a licence for women's teams to play more games at their corresponding Premier League or Championship ground.

But as the inquest into the situation at Kingsmeadow rumbled on into a new week, nearly every piece of analysis was followed by the caveat of: 'at least no-one got hurt'. Sadly, Beard was not even afforded that small mercy, the Liverpool boss confirming on Wednesday that winger Shanice van de Sanden had been absent from training after slipping in last weekend's warm-up and feeling a twinge in her knee.

Van de Sanden's injury represents perhaps the clearest reason of all why the game at Chelsea should never have gone ahead. While late postponements are an annoyance for broadcasters and a huge source of frustration for travelling fans, player safety must always come first.

After a deluge of ACL injuries in the WSL this season, the need to consider player welfare has never been more great. Especially for a side like Liverpool, who don't have unlimited funds to beef up their squad and whose attacking options are already limited by the loss of last season's top-scorer, Leanne Kiernan, to injury.

The Reds will travel down to London again on Sunday, where they will - hopefully - take on Chelsea in the fourth round of the FA Cup. The current weather forecast indicates it's unlikely the officials will have to make another late call on whether the game should go ahead.

But the next time such a call does have to be made, one can only hope that whatever decision is taken - for the sake of the women's game - is the right one.

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