Original Lioness Believes Current European Champions Have Made Pioneer Players ‘Less Invisible’

50 years ago today, the England women’s soccer team played its official first match winning 3-2 away to Scotland in Greenock the year after a half-century long ban on the game was rescinded. Last month, those pioneering players were honored at Wembley Stadium.

Ahead of England’s match against the United States, 12 members of the 1972 squad, the original Lionesses, were presented a bespoke cap, denied to them at the time by the English Football Association (FA) who did not recognize the team. 50 years on, and now fully professional, the England women’s team won their first major trophy during the summer, defeating Germany in the UEFA Women’s Euro final.

For 1972 goalkeeper, Sue Whyatt this summer’s triumph felt like destiny. “I was in bits after it, I have to say, absolute bits. It’s what made us have this opportunity now. The fact that they won the Euros has actually made us less invisible, because we were invisible really. Nobody was interested in us to be quite honest and in our 50th year for them to win the Euros, it’s almost like fate.”

Earlier that week, Whyatt was among a score of former players invited to meet the current squad at their training base at The Lensbury in Teddington. Naturally, Whyatt sought out her successor in the England goal, Manchester United’s Mary Earps. “She said thank you to me!” Wyhatt said of their encounter. “I feel very humbled because I was not the player that she is now but there again we didn’t have the same opportunities, we didn’t have the same training. We just had to train ourselves virtually.”

Playing at the time for Macclesfield Ladies, one of the 44 teams who formed the nascent Women’s Football Association (WFA), Whyatt is thankful for her predecessors for keeping, what was then, an outlawed game going. “The ladies who formed that, actually played during the 1950s and 60s, so we’re stood on their shoulders as well. They’d kept that game going, all through the bans and formed that team when the bans were finished in 1971.”

Aged just 16, still at school and studying for her A-levels, Whyatt went through a series of trials to earn selection for the first-ever official England team, first coming through at county level, then a North versus South trial, then Probables versus Possibles before the best fifteen were sent letters of selection on headed notepaper by WFA Secretary Patricia Gregory.

Whyatt was one of a new generation of girls who were inspired by the victory of the England men’s team in the 1966 World Cup and wanted to play the game themselves. As a budding goalkeeper, Whyatt looked up to England’s legendary shot-stopper in that tournament. “He was my absolute hero Gordon Banks,” she tells me.”I was lucky enough to meet him when he was playing for Stoke City.”

When she asked the man renowned as ‘The Banks of England’ for advice, he gave her the tip of standing away from her favorite side when facing a penalty kick. As Whyatt revealed to me, it was a trick which ultimately got her into the England team. “In one of the final trial games – Probables versus Possibles – I saved three penalties so I say that was down to Gordon Banks!”

The historic first official match was played in front of an estimated 400 spectators at the Ravenscraig Stadium in Greenock, Scotland, almost exactly 100 years after the first official men’s international match between the same two nations in 1872. Whyatt recalls the surroundings were far from glamorous. “When we went onto the pitch for the anthems, the sleet started. You’re thinking ‘my goodness, this pitch is frozen.’ I think nowadays, they probably wouldn’t have even played the match, it was so bad. It was treacherous.”

Unlike the first men’s international which finished goalless, England rallied from going two goals down to win 3-2. However, the players did not receive the recogniton they felt they deserved. “What they gave us first, was a little Wedgewood box for playing and then a little silver dish,” Whyatt remembers. “We said ‘what’s this? We want a cap like the men!’ and they said, ‘you can’t have a cap, you’re not entitled to a cap, The FA wouldn’t give you one.'”

It was left to WFA officer, Florence Bilton, herself a former goalkeeper, to step in, as Whyatt recalls, “Flo Bilton got her sewing machine out and she made us replica caps. They’re fabulous and mine’s on my wall at home, and I wouldn’t part with that for anything in the world. It’s black, it’s got the WFA crest on the front and a little tassle. You can see it’s home-made, but it means the world to me that does.”

From today, as for the England men’s team, The FA will introduce legacy numbers for every woman who has represented the senior Lionesees, listing their place in England’s history starting with the 15 pioneers who travelled to Grennock in 1972. Every former player will in due course receive a special velvet cap with their newly established legacy number embroidered on the front.

Tragically, Wyhatt, who went on to work in the police force, was forced to quit the game she loved just three years later, still aged just 19, the victim of under-representation in another industry. “They promised me I would be able to go and continue training and play. When it actually came to it, because there was only a few women in the police force at the time, each station had a female officer in case women or children came in and they needed searching or anything like that.”

“They could have actually got somebody in from one of the other stations to cover me so I could play, but they didn’t. When I asked and told them the chief constable said I could, well they said ‘he’s not here now’. So I had to stop playing.”

“We’ve had to fight for everything. Even in the police force, I had to fight to become the first female dog handler. I feel like I’ve been fighting for 50 years but it’s been worth it. To see this girls now, it was worth it, wasn’t it?”