Rebel Yell

Popular football magazine, When Saturday Comes, has a contest every year for non-writers to submit an article to them. There's a prize of £250, but when I submitted the following, all I wanted to do was see my name in print and be able to call myself a published writer. The remit was "anything football related", so I chose to write about last season - my first following my local women's team, but not my last!

Unfortunately I found out today that my article wasn't picked, but it means that I can publish it here, at least.

It was a no brainer, really. I’d been following women’s football in the UK for seven years already, ever since Tabea Kemme signed for Arsenal women, and I’d seen them go from strength to strength. When I bought a house round the corner from a tier 4 women’s side, it made sense to go and support my new local team. Arsenal were getting crowds of 30,000 - more than most men’s clubs - but Worthing, I figured, might appreciate an extra person coming to their games.

What I didn’t expect was where the season would take me.

Not to away games - I had a mortgage to pay, not being able to drive, and the side being in a geographically difficult division meant that Sunday train journeys to Plymouth, Swindon and Bristol were out of the question. But the novelty of having a football club on my doorstep didn’t fade a bit. The first game of the season, I stopped off on my way home from a trip to London to catch the final 84 minutes of a National League cup game - granted, it was a 7-0 defeat, but that was to a WSL academy side, so there would be some difference to be expected.

As I gradually got to chat to players, coaching staff, and the family thereof, it dawned on me just how different football at this level is to what I’d been used to before. The men’s side I’ve been supporting for decades, their natural level is also tier 4 - but that’s for a football league that didn’t have a 50 year break before rebuilding. These players weren’t earning a living from playing football. They weren’t even earning anything, not even expenses, giving up their Sundays (quite often a full day, with travel involved) and their Tuesday/Thursday evenings to play for free, for the love of the game.

Coming out of my shell and chatting more and more as the season went on, I realised how much dedication these women were putting in. Getting up at the crack of dawn on a Sunday to travel to the south west would usually mean an early night beforehand, so minimal social life. Working a 9-5 in London, then a round trip of three hours to training. Juggling games and training with studying for a degree (or, in some cases, A-levels) and part time work as well. 

The first five games all ended in defeats, a combined scoreline of 3-26, including a 0-9 defeat in the league on a miserable damp afternoon. I could still go to football without expecting a win - years of being a Gillingham fan have beaten that into me - so it became ritualistic. I’d go, hoping for a win, finding some glimmer of light to enjoy, clapping the team off at the end. 

Things changed with the FA Cup as an emphatic 4-1 trouncing of league rivals Abingdon meant I had a win to celebrate at the fifth time of asking. Two days later a knackered team conceded a 99th minute equaliser, denied a first home league win by the last kick of the game. That came at the seventh time of asking, beating relegation rivals - as by this time we were in a dogfight at the foot of the table - Keynsham Town 4-2 on a bitterly cold December afternoon. 

Halfway through the season is very soon to be pessimistic about your team’s chances, but the Keynsham win was immediately followed the following week by a reverse of the same scoreline, and then top scorer Lauren Amrena moving sideways to an upwardly mobile QPR - the same level, but a different league, and the opposing end of their respective table. 

A brief fun afternoon came in the Sussex Cup. with an 11-1 thrashing of a local side’s reserve team - in which the use of roll on, roll off subs meant that my conversation with a player was punctuated by two spells on the pitch for her - but even this cup run ended the following round, away to Eastbourne Borough, being downed by a hat-trick from a 16 year old on her first start. Not even the return from injury of the talismanic Eleanor Keegan, after suffering a vicious facial injury in a pre-season game that could only be described as friendly in the loosest possible terms, could halt the slide. 

By the end of February a lopsided schedule meant that there were only two more home games left - each a month apart. While relegation felt like a trudge towards inevitability, the breaks between home games meant I was still excited for the matches. A 10-0 defeat to table toppers Swindon, on the heels of losing 10-2 at 2nd place Moneyfields, still didn’t relegate us. Granted, staying up would require three defeats for Keynsham, and three wins of twelve goals - each - so it was all over but the crying. 

Attending the last game of the season, the day after the men’s team got promoted to hitherto unreached heights, felt strangely relaxed. The team didn’t see off the year with a win, going down 5-0, but there were enough signs that next year we can mount a decent promotion charge. 

What didn’t help was the inconsistency of the line-ups. I saw 37 different players turn out for the Rebels across the fifteen games I saw this season. Accounting for the fact that most games, the subs bench was only two or three deep, I rarely saw an unchanged lineup. The attrition of players, in conjunction with minimal training sessions, made it hard for the team to find a rhythm together. Hopefully next year will see a more settled lineup, along with a defined pathway for the development squad members to join the first team, instead of being called up as cover.

Two months on from the end of the season, and there’s reasons to be cheerful. We’ve been placed in a more local league, for a start - the furthest away game is Barking, rather than Plymouth. Early training photos show that the core of the team has stayed for another season. The club have brought in a Head of Football Operations purely for the women’s side. There’s shafts of light that, hopefully, we can capitalise on. 

And even if we lose, I’m only 15 minutes walk from my sofa, at least!

We've Lost McCabe, Katie McCabe

On May 14th it was confirmed that Katie McCabe’s eleven years at Arsenal would come to an end. The timing was auspicious, coming the day after Arsenal’s last home game, and the last chance the majority of fans would have to honour her. Rumours abounded that the club had offered a new contract to the player but had failed to reach an agreement. A rousing reception was given on social media to a player who had become a stalwart for the side, one of the last remaining players of the 2019 WSL winning team, and one whose adaptability had proven useful - as well as making the left back slot her own, she had played further up the pitch as a winger, and slotted in comfortably at centre back in the heated Champions League quarter finals against Chelsea.

I took to McCabe immediately after starting to follow Arsenal in the summer of 2018. I’d always been a fan of a player with a dubious attitude to the laws of the game regarding the health and wellbeing of the opposition. I grew up watching Gillingham in the era of Andy Hessenthaler, a midfield general who made up in violence what he lacked in height; I only started supporting Arsenal after they signed Tabea Kemme, one of the few players to be sent off for taking a throw-in (her innocent “what?” upon receiving the red card is unparalleled in its denialism), so McCabe’s swashbuckling tackling was always going to go down well in my book!

McCabe was almost ever-present during that title winning season, playing the most minutes out of everyone, and popping up with crucial goals as well - breaking Birmingham’s resolve late on the last day of March to secure Arsenal’s Champions League qualification, and the second in the title-winning 4-0 thrashing of Brighton to claim the league.

At international level, she became her country’s captain at the age of 21 (the youngest in Ireland’s history) and negotiated equal pay for the men’s and women’s national teams shortly after receiving her 50th cap in 2021. Two years later she scored her country’s first goal at a Women’s World Cup and became the first Irishwoman nominated for the Ballon D’Or. 

McCabe’s last campaign in an Arsenal shirt will be remembered, chiefly, for the Champions League quarter final games against Chelsea. Due to injuries and bookings she played the second half of both matches in an unfamiliar (at club level) centre back position, playing her part in limiting Chelsea to a (frankly, superb) long range dink by James in the first leg, and a breakaway goal late on in the second. 

What she looked set to be remembered for was tugging back Alyssa Thompson immediately after the restart. On first glance it looked to be a simple shirt pull, part and parcel of the game at any level across all genders; replays showed she’d grabbed a fistful of Thompson’s hair, an act that incensed Chelsea players, fans and coaching staff (in the absence of VAR, Chelsea’s manager Sonia Bompaster took to showing replays during the post-match press conference, to explain the vociferous complaints that earned her two yellow cards). 

This was the latest in a series of provocative incidents that she'd had in games with Chelsea, going back years. A lot of players seem to revel in playing the heel, antagonising and winding up opposition fans, and McCabe is one of the best. Her cheeky grin in response to a chorus of boos became her signature, signifying the fact that she knew what she was doing and she was doing it well.

It was a surprise, then, when on the 1st of June Chelsea announced that they had signed McCabe to a three-year contract. That length would suggest that it had played some factor in the transfer - rumours abounded that Arsenal had offered her a shorter contract which would also see her playing second fiddle to the Spanish International speculated to be joining the club.

Even so, the outcry on social media was quite something to behold. Posts made in the wake of the Champions League quarter final were frantically being deleted on both sides - by Chelsea fans, who now would see the player some had wanted a lifetime ban for, playing in their sponsorless home shirts, and by Arsenal fans who had felt betrayed by the hero that they valiantly defended against (fairly warranted) criticism - turning heel on them and joining what they perceive to be the enemy.

Despite the minor backlash, the majority of fans respect McCabe for all that she’s done for the club, and will get a rousing reception when she returns to the Emirates - right up until she unceremoniously scythes down a red shirted player, and flashes that familiar grin!