Embracing Nostalgia Today can help us Celebrate Women’s Football in the Future
In the aftermath of Celtic’s 2–0 victory over Rangers in the first ever Women’s Scottish Cup Final to be played at Scotland’s National Stadium, Hampden Park, players from the winning side headed towards goal with scissors in hand. Each looking to snip a little bit of history.
In an act of preservation the yellow nets (along with the corner flags, both bespoke to this year’s showpiece) which would eventually have it’s strings excitedly frayed are being gifted to the Scottish Football Museum and the Glasgow Women’s Library. The start of a plan to add more colour to the palette of women’s football history in Scotland.
As the players cut away it was a moment that had me questioning how we document the past and present of our game? Now, of course, as it evolves, there are things that are far more pressing. Player welfare both on and off the park, the need for more coaches, medics, safeguarding, commerical growth and cultivating habitual fanbases are all at the forefront of respective minds but this week I’ve reflected on how tactile representation of events, or more accurately the lack of it, in an increasingly digital age provides a unique challenge for the women’s game in Scotland and beyond to overcome.
It was a thought that first arose in the aforementioned Glasgow Women’s Library (based in the city’s east end it is the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women’s history and achievements). Having been present the Wednesday before for the final pre-match press conferences, navigating my way through the usual interview routines I decided to hang back to explore the shelves a little further.
Anybody who has had to research facts and figures relating to Scottish women’s football will have done the same. As a consequence of the restrictions imposed upon it, the details of games and teams past are often sketchy, so the possibility of a new information source had piqued my interest. After carefully slaloming up, down and around the ground floor a couple of times I located a laminated map taped flush against the end of one of the many rows of books waiting to be read. Casting my eyes across the paper my gaze hunted for the sports section, or more specifically anything relating to football.
A couple of minutes passed and my index finger had joined the search party, tracing down a list of categories found beside the literary schematic. Categories spanned everything from African American Painting through History and Law to Politics and Young Adult Fiction, the word “Sport” though (or any other iteration of it) wasn’t anywhere to be seen. I was befuddled. Our degrees of success in athletic pursuit may be notoriously inconsistent but there is no denying that sport is as engrained in our national discourse as Irn Bru’s recipe change, independence and the authenticity of a tourist consuming a deep fried Mars bar.
Having now gone into full-blown investigative mode I headed to the desk to ask for assistance. There were indeed books dedicated to women in sport, cycling and swimming the two main pursuits along side of course football and a couple of others but they were housed across just a couple of shelves within an entire building. It didn’t feel right that while other subjects were bursting sport would be so sparse. In conversation my guide articulated the desire for more and so I was left wondering about the stories untold that could help fill the gaps and perhaps warrant a new heading on the laminated listing of dreams.
This hadn’t been the first time I had gone in search of women’s football history. Like most people during that period we now look back on shudderingly as Lockdown I had rattled through a number of ways to pass the time, one of which became scouring eBay looking for fanzines from times past. In amongst the crude drawings and pun-filled headlines one in particular raised my interest, “Born Kicking”, which I would learn is widely believed to be the first fanzine dedicated to women’s football in England. I promptly lodged a bid and a week or so later had a couple held in my hand.
On arrival the pages were crumpled, the staples rusty and bleeding onto pages once white, now tinged a custardy shade. It smelled like old paper and was typed out in the careful but haphazard manner that only the clickety-clack of a typewriter’s mechanism could do. Its creator Jane Purdon is currently the Director of Women in Football and it’s contents included everything that those who bemoan the demise of the fanzine are so often keen to eulogise.
Writing this in the present day I returned to eBay, to see what could be lurking and was surprised to find a copy of Kick Off — Scotland’s First Women’s Football Fanzine (if you could all not go looking for it to bid on that would be swell). Edited by Tommy Malcolm, formerly of Carmunnock Ladies and at the time a volunteer Press Officer for the SWFA (Scottish Women’s Football Association), the front page of Issue 8 from August 1994 read: Time for Change? Peter Clarke and the Scotland Squad.”, accompanied by a photo of the said underfire team. A little more digging and I found a number of images from other issues on the Football Memories Scotland website. Each recognisable in it’s style, each a little bit of history.
More practically fanzines, much like photographs, programmes and magazines have become an important tool used to help populate the pixels of memories faded by time. For the men’s game these are often stacked high, stored in boxes or framed and put on display. Sometimes, they are highly traded commodities, at other times cherished artefacts to pull out and recall personal memories alone or together. The volume of history that documents Scottish football at times can feel overwhelming, but for the women’s game those numbers are more rare.
As we continue to live in an increasingly digital age it feels the tactility of programmes, badges, fanzines and ticket stubs are on the cusp of passing this and future generations by. Collections and reference points set to never exsist.
Maybe this is just me shouting at the clouds but it is why when in France for the Women’s World Cup in 2019 I kept the city branded Coca Cola cups that told where Scotland had played their games, sourced paper tickets, bought the tournament programme, collected the stickers and stuck a pin badge or two in my collection.
Internationally Scotland have provided programmes for as long as I can remember following the national side. Major domestic semi-finals and finals now have them regularly issued and I’ve been fortuante to contribute to recent editions. I have them in a box along with a rare collection of SWPL matchday offerings, some issued every other Sunday to a small but passionate home support, others special edition, like the one recently acquired at Links Park to mark Montrose’s presentation as SWPL2 Champions.
When How’s Your Touch followed up their already purchased 2022 SWPL themed trading cards with a second season in 2023 I bought the lot, storing each one in a protective plastic sleeve, and when Steelmen Pins produced a pin to celebrate one of their own in Motherwell midfielder Amy Anderson I added it to my collection, it’s sold out now.
One of my favourite items comes from an SWPL Cup tie between Motherwell and Partick Thistle at Airdrieonians’ Excelsior Stadium on the 9th March 2020; a programme from what would be the final game of women’s football played in Scotland before the world was closed to us all. It was just a stiff sheet of card, folded and printed on both sides, the inside’s upside down when compared with the out. An imperfection that made it more endearing, even though the circumstances that followed were not.
As I watched back the footage of Kelly Clark, Chloe Craig, Jacynta et al. clipping away at the nets that their teammates had rippled on their way to cup glory I thought about where they would finally be displayed.
Well actually, I’ll be honest, my first thought was how it would be pretty cool to have gotten a piece of that action myself but once I moved past that I thought about the imperfections that the snipping will have left; a hole with a story to explain, to start a conversation, to re-ignite a memory for years and years to come. In the future, will these be lost?
The day will one day come where we laugh at the notion of news and stories being printed on paper, the same way everyone guffaws at the mention of the word MiniDisc today. Technology could see memories injected into our brain via artificial intelligence. Virtual reality could be used to bring past stories back to life and mobile phone screens will have most likely been replaced by something even more addictive.
Perhaps though, as women’s football in Scotland looks to the future, providing tangible nostalgia today, be it through goal nets or something more conventional, could become the gift that keeps on giving for years to come.
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Cheers for reading and catch you again soon.