The fundamental question risks sounding like a clunky iteration of C.B. Palmer’s “Bar Joke”.
Three women walk into the chief executive's office at the Football Association of Wales - and walk out with a national football team.
How?
Former goalkeeper and one of those three women, Karen Jones, is cheerfully candid. She “doesn’t really know” how it happened.
Laura McAllister (second of the three women and caddy corner to Jones in a cosy red booth at Canton’s Hard Lines coffee shop near Cardiff City Stadium) counters, contending that the three of them had a more than convincing argument. She should know. She penned the letter.
Michele Adams MBE (third of the trio, soft-spoken only in terms of actual volume) smiles before offering her answer: “It’s because we were three angry, angry women.”
Cue laughter.
The interview hasn’t officially begun yet. Adams and Jones’ tea bags are only just starting to cool outside their white mugs. McAllister’s rain coat is still damp. The catch-up talk has yet to reach its climax, which is the news that Tommy, the three-year-old hamster of McAllister’s eldest daughter, has unexpectedly passed, news that godmothers Adams and Jones respond to in exquisite godmother-fashion.
At this point, the time-worn 3ft-x-3ft booth selected for this hour and a half chat is still clueless to the sheer concentration of female power of which it’s about to be privy.
When it comes to women’s football in Wales, former internationals and current Cardiff City Ladies co-chairs Adams, Jones and McAllister have become synonymous with its history and genesis. Which is really just a fancy way of saying that when events like Thursday night storm into view – Wales Women’s historic World Cup qualifying play-off win over against Bosnia – they find themselves “wheeled out” into the media spotlight thanks to the events of 1992.
Not that they begrudge the attention. As they reminisce about the surprise meeting with the late FAW general secretary Alun Evans that led to the official creation of a national women’s team in Wales 30 years ago, the trio are candidly chatty and thought-provoking, without losing the charm of three long-time girlfriends. There are interruptions, sharp opinions, loose story ends snapped up and careered in every other direction. It’s a conversation that takes us from Cardiff to a Hannover to, eventually, Thursday night’s semi-final and their respective plans to watch the affair unfold together.
In terms of shape, the conversation is a cyclone. It is exhilarating. It is also fitting.
When it comes to this meeting — or, more aptly, the watershed territory in which women’s football in Wales acquired an official foundation —, the narrative has traditionally followed a painless arc: three female footballers approached Evans to secure FAW recognition for the women's game in Wales. The word “lobbied” is used. Thirty years later, Wales Women are potentially on the brink of a first World Cup/major tournament qualification.
The narrative does not neatly fit into this linear chain of Wikipedia-worthy events so comfortably.
Lifting the ban on women playing
Any talk of 1993 requires a brief prologue of the 20 years that occurred prior, when the ban on women playing football from the 1920s was finally lifted. Women on the pitch continued to be viewed as unfeminine and "unsuitable", but Irishman John Rooney pushed for the creation of a national women’s team in the early ‘70s after establishing a team within his bottle-top company and discovering others were sprouting around the country. According to Jones, the players' unwavering commitment impressed him.
In 1973, the first international match was organised against the Republic of Ireland at Llanelli Stadium. The unofficial nature that defined women's football of this era is important to note. Coaching was a myth (“I wasn’t coached until I was 25,” Jones says. “I started playing goalkeeper at 15”), as is photographic evidence of the time. International matches occurred roughly once a year. Team trials, kits, fixtures and pitches were sourced by hand and against Ireland, Wales marched out in borrowed shirts from Swansea City men’s.
“It was like glue on us,” Adams recalls of her debut, the only one of the trio to play. “The sky absolutely tipped down. It was old-fashioned grass pitches, so you just grew mud as the game went on. And we were all young, all in our teens, and this kit just dragged.”
Wales lost 3-2.
In 1974, Wales went down to England in their second international, with Rooney sourcing kits for the players this time (red long-sleeve shirts featuring a tri-collar and the Prince of Wales feathers). Afterwards, however, any kit came courtesy of second-hand kindness or borrowing. At domestic level, clubs like Cardiff Ladies, established in 1975 and ultimately taken charge of by Jones and Adams, followed a similar status quo. Periodically, the FAW “would throw something in our direction,” says Adams.
Genuine dialogue with the FAW failed to exist for those two decades, not for a lack of trying on Jones' and Adams' part. Then, the FAW was “a closed shop”, they claim, with external-facing activities and community projects not part of the remit. Relationships were impossible to develop, particularly for women.
The result caused turbulence in the women's game. The national team had two “deaths” - one in the early eighties followed by another at the turn of the decade as finances, support and numbers hit troughs. Where England had established the Women’s Football Association (independent from the FA) in 1969 to organise and stabilise the women’s game, Wales had no equivalent infrastructure to lean on, unless it was the stubborn backs of women like Adams and Jones.
“Everyone thinks that point in 1993 was the most important,” says McAllister. “It was a turning point, but the girls were playing in the ‘70s and it was another 20 years before the FAW got involved at all.”
McAllister moved to Cardiff after finishing a degree at the London School of Economics in the late ‘80s. In London, the Bridgend youngster played for Millwall Lionesses and was eager to continue a career, but she doubted any clubs in Wales could compare with England's standards. Cardiff Council handed her Jones’ number from Cardiff Ladies.
“When I got to know the girls and started playing for Cardiff, I couldn’t believe how much Karen and Michele put into establishing an infrastructure of the game, and doing it all themselves,” McAllister says. “I remember thinking, what have we got to lose? Why don’t we go back to the FAW and show them how professional this is? The worst they can do is continue to not support us.”
Adams and Jones didn’t immediately share McAllister’s young, steely spirit. Twenty years of being palmed off had left them slightly jaded figures, but McAllister was persistent.
How long did that convincing period last?
“Not long, if I remember,” Jones concedes.
“A couple of beers probably,” Adams confirms.
That meeting in FAW office
It's tea-time on an indeterminate Thursday, and three young women sit opposite a headmastery-looking man who sits at a ginormous headmastery-looking desk at the top of the FAW's former HQ on Cardiff’s Westgate Street. The building is of unapologetic Victorian style, fit with a grand mahogany staircase, spanking-new carpet emblazoned with the Welsh badge spanning every room and only one woman in the form of Alun Evans’ secretary.
“I can still see the rugs. They must have sold an arm and a leg for them,” Adams says.
Between the couple of beers and this Thursday tea-time, McAllister drafted a very basic letter to Evans. “It just said, this is our club, they'd been organising the team unofficially and we think it’s time the FAW took a role. Can we come and see you?”
That Evans afforded the trio an audience was, in itself, a triumph. But McAllister, Adams and Jones didn’t fret over composing a 10-page dossier to push their case. None brought notes. In fact, “we didn’t prepare anything,” Adams says.
Nothing?
Nope.
And you managed to convince one of the most powerful men (if not the most powerful man at the FAW) to alter the course of history?
“It was the passion!” Jones says, without the faintest scent of irony. “That’s all we had. We just talked the talk.”
It sounds ludicrous, and in the 90s, it arguably was. Women were still fighting a stigma of having the ability to kick a ball, let alone play a full 90 minutes at tempo (many men believed women's matches should consist of two 30-minute halves, citing health reasons). Passion was an intangible reserved solely for women in domestic walks of life.
But it’s worth a moment to reflect here on these women. Even now, underlying a sense of almost auntie-like charm and sagacity, together they carry a hazardous level of persuasion and conviction. As brews are gingerly sipped, there lingers the sense that the best course of action is one of zero doubt, even amid the more out-there claims that freedom fighter jets flew over the pitch when the women played Croatia away in 1994, or that Jones once wore Ian Rush’s hand-me-down tracksuit (all of which is true).
In an expensive top-floor office predominantly accustomed to male aura, those hazardous levels of conviction would’ve been overwhelming.
That’s not to say Evans was immediately converted.
“He was sceptical,” McAllister says. “I can still remember his face, like ‘who are these girls coming in, telling me what to do in football?’ And don’t forget, there was no knowledge of what [Adams and Jones] had done, or our club really at that time. He wouldn’t have known anything about it. He’d have rarely watched a women’s match. It was all fresh to him.”
As the conversation continued, though, the more interested Evans became, Jones says. He attended a Cardiff Ladies match soon afterwards, first with his two sons and wife, and then with FAW treasurer Des Shanklin.
“I think Alun thought it was going to be very amateurish, that we wouldn’t be able to sell what we were doing,” McAllister says, who became a friend of Evans until his death in 2011. “He told me later on he was more impressed by how well organised Cardiff Ladies seemed to be. That’s why he came to watch. He wanted to see if it reflected on the pitch.”
McAllister delivers the necessary caveat that the vertical by which the FAW was run then was less “democratic” to now. In other words, if Evans liked it, he got it.
And Evans liked women’s football.
Within weeks, trials for a 16-player international squad were set up across Cardiff, Caldicot and Liverpool as Evans entered Wales into the 1995 European Championship qualifiers, but the new way was not without its bumps. A number of former internationals didn’t make the Euros cut, making way for young maiden players instead, some of whose vague Welsh roots prompted doubts over eligibility and even stirred small pockets of resentment.
Management was mostly a part-time skeleton, headed up by Lyn Jones (then Inter Cardiff manager), along with Frank Hagerty and goalkeeping coach George Wood.
Only one training session occurred before Wales embarked on their competitive journey, leaving them open to a baptism of fire as they fought Switzerland, Croatia and reigning world champions Germany for a place in Europe.
“That qualifying group, we were like dwarf-sized Welsh people walking into the land of the giants,” says Jones as she recalls their romp in Hannover. It’s swiftly decided that asking about the consecutive 12-0 losses to Germany is useful to no one. “Things got worse as they went on.”
Wales finished bottom of the group with zero points and 36 goals conceded.
“Oh, we didn’t care!” Jones, true to character, insists. “We didn’t care at all. When you think about what we were doing, it was a massive milestone. I remember being at the St. David’s Hotel [in Chester] and seeing the cakes and thinking, ‘We’ve made it.’”
Starting to close the gap
The manner in which Wales crashed out of the Euros was, on the one hand, a sobering expression of the gulf in quality, funding and time that sat between them and women’s football top echelons. While Evans supplied the team with full support, travelling to matches and promising to treat the women’s outfit like the men’s (which he did, according to McAllister. It was just that the men weren’t treated very well either, she reckons), Wales were still contending against nations that had embarked on their journeys some years or decades earlier.
Investment and coaching posed the largest obstacles. Where FAW coaching saw marked improvements as years went on, a return to Cardiff Ladies left many players with grassroot calibre staff and little opportunity for technical development. The women's game saw little investment pumped into it to move it passed a trundling existence, and with professional careers a far-away pipe dream, many players found themselves forced into the difficult balancing act of playing football while chiselling away at full-time jobs to support themselves, lest they forego the sport they love entirely. That balancing act still exists today.
Paltry medical treatment also threatened to undermine any hard yards, as did the lack of back room staff, which rarely ventured beyond a sole physio and/or kitman stocked with second-hand ware. Adams notes that only four years ago management staff began to grow from more than six or seven on international duty, citing her time with the Wales under-19s. “This is the thing, people think what we have now, has been for 10 years but it hasn’t really,” she says. “Tash [Harding] Jess [Fishlock] remember the days of one physio and men’s kits. It’s much more recent than people think.”
On the ground, meagre attention was paid to the women by fans or media after Evans’ backing, making any attempt at mounting momentum from the ground up strenuous. To those outside the players’ families and immediate circles, women's football hardly existed.
The world opens up
Did they expect to make it here, then? A World Cup semi-final play-off victory in front of a record 15,200 fans?
“Maybe it’s the benefit of hindsight, but I remember thinking [after speaking to some of the Switzerland players] there was the potential for us to grow, but we were going to need a lot of support to do it," McAllister says. "I think we all thought it wouldn’t happen for our generation, but it would happen for the next.
Against the current backdrop in which women’s football is finally garnering notable media attention, Evans’ unprecedented belief 30 years ago is striking, particularly given less than three years ago McAllister was still lobbying terrestrial television companies to air women’s football matches live.
“It’s easy to say that with a little bit of success, the world opens up,” she says. ”But these are strategic people, and if you are a strategic person, you should be looking at the future.”
McAllister, Adams and Jones make no hesitations in insisting that Evans was of this breed of forethought. Jones owes Evans with taking Cardiff Ladies off the local parks, allowing the club the space to play at Leckwith Stadium and creating the Women’s Welsh Cup, the final of which was held at Cardiff Arms Park before the men’s. Evans also established an under-18s side for the national team, the first evidence of a clear pathway that players like Fishlock and Sophie Ingle would eventually follow.
“You can’t really describe how instrumental Alun was in the women’s game. No one has really documented that properly,” McAllister says.
“And if you look back at the early years, when there were men running women’s football, all of them were all quite sceptical to start off with. Even Lyn Jones was wondering, ‘What am I dealing with here?’ But when they saw how technical the girls were and how committed we were to playing, they warmed up really quickly.
“It just shows that it’s mainly ignorance that stops men from believing in women’s football.”
Three years ago, few men had ever watched a women’s football match. Now, men comprise the record-breaking crowds at Cardiff City Stadium.
The point paves the way for the bigger issue underpinning the story of women’s football in Wales; a game that, over the decades, has built itself up from enforced extinction and total indifference to create something fresh, exhilarating and empowering, yet continues to rely on men to enable it from the top-down.
Jones, Adams and McAllister are not bitter towards those men who pepper the game's history. Without them, this story arguably doesn't exist. But the dearth of agency held by women with footballing backgrounds at board and council level in Wales is noticeable.
"How can we improve things like periods in football at a technical level, when all the technical directors are male?” McAllister asks. “That’s still a battle we face. Most FA’s don’t have a good representation of women.”
Potential World Cup qualification for Wales bears the capacity to change things, as much in terms of finance as profile. Already, the shift in the national game has been tectonic over the last two years. With a larger profile, McAllister argues professionalising the game across all levels “with a lower-case p” is critical, from professional medics, coaches, club development and public relations to ensuring women have voices in powerful places.
“Otherwise the game is vulnerable,” McAllister says.
Adams concurs, adding that the need for more women to have opportunities to not only work in football but to open the doors for other women demands improvement if women are to remain in the sport after retiring. She recalls how she and Jones attained coaching badges only after being encouraged by a former male coach.
“We were pushed by men throughout, and that shouldn’t be the case now. It should be women opening doors for other women to walk through,” she says.
None of Jones, Adams or McAllister would alter the past. For Wales to reach this point, they had to disturb the silence from which women’s football had originally been shoved. They’ve done so, fulfilling a dream of playing for their country in the meantime. But big steps remain to be taken. And while the three have enjoyed being the disturbers, they acknowledge the responsibility of doing so on and off the pitch shouldn’t have fallen so squarely on their shoulders.
The 'game-changing' moment
Adams, Jones and McAllister unanimously agree Thursday night's victory qualifies as a “game-changing moment”. One gets the feeling they know how to use the word more appropriately than most, having been the very catalysts for the biggest one to date in women’s football history.
Yet, a difference exists between the two. On that nondescript Thursday in 1992, the game-changing moment necessitated asking a man a question. Last night, no such question needed be asked.
The distinction is huge.
“We have to stop asking for things for the women’s game,” McAllister says. “It should be automatic that women are treated the same way as men. We shouldn’t have to ask because it’s our game as well.
“There’s always been this idea that football is a men’s game, run by men for men but it’s never been that really. It’s just that men have commandeered it and excluded women. In the future, I’d like to see a game where it’s properly integrated, from decision-making all the way to grassroots. All of it is done for everybody by everybody. That will be the biggest change the sport could see in this country.”
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