Football is something I live and breathe. Women’s football specifically and West Ham particularly. I can rattle off facts, figures and statistics as if it’s my shopping list for the month. When I am not watching football, I am talking about it and if I am not talking about it, I am playing it.
About four years ago I was chatting to the infamous Helen Hardy about something unrelated when she posed the very important question. Why I hadn’t come down to play for her team, Manchester Laces? Good question, why hadn’t I? Maybe because I hadn’t played football since I was 12. Or that lockdown had made me lazy? Or that I still had that deep-seated team sport anxiety from school. The kind that still makes me weary of the gaggles of teenage girls in public.
I put all of that aside and went along to the next training session and fell in love with the game in a completely new way.
So on and off for those four years I have played for the Purple squad. The faces may have changed in that time, but the mentality and the love we have for each other have never wavered.
In our marvellous nine aside league we play seventy billion Bury teams. Ok, slight exaggeration, but there are like four, which is a lot when you are a South Manchester club. Why do we play so many, let me give you a rundown.
For those unaware of Bury’s history, they were a decent club until a slimy owner ran them into bankruptcy and they folded. Then two different organisations took on the Bury mantle and ran them as separate clubs. Think MK Dons and AFC Wimbledon both have the same vein of history but are very different.
There was a tussle for Gigg Lane, the historic ground of the Shakers, Bury Fans Est 1885 owned it but had no real team. AFC Bury had the team but not the ground. In 2022 a merger was agreed and football returned to this Lancashire town.
However, this meant the various women’s teams that had been on each side of the divide came together and entered our leagues with their hundred billion teams.
They do however have the honour of playing all games at the historic stadium. Which means last Friday I got that same honour.
So why should you care I hear you cry, why do you, Allie, care? All you do is blather on about West Ham. Why is it an honour for you to play your nine-aside match there? Other than the fact it’s an actual stadium and not some school’s Astro where we normally play our fixtures.
Previously I have talked about what the Laces as a whole means to me. About my mother who enforced the claret and blue on me as a small child and what an influence she is on me.
However, I have another footballing influence in my life and that influence began in the Lancashire town of Bury, many moons ago.
My nan Jean was born in Whitefield in the year of never you mind. ( Seriously, I can’t tell you, she will kill me if I give away her age). Jean grew up in a time when there was not a lot to do, to be honest. She often told me that she has seen a lot of the beginnings of films and never the end. This is because public transport in her home town was so bad, you had to leave the cinema halfway through or risk getting stranded.
So I do suppose it was probably boredom that turned my nan into the most unlikely football fan. And the most logical team for her to follow was the Shakers.
Honestly, I have no idea what turned my nan into football. I don’t think she knows. What I do know is my nan became a die-hard. Frankly, this is where I get my hardcore devotion.
Jean started following Bury in the early ’50s. What started as a fun way to pass the time on a Saturday, soon became a way of life. She followed Bury FC home and away for many seasons. Which is starting to sound oh so familiar. Her love of the game became legendary within the footballing community. She was offered lifts on the team coach, to make sure she got there and back safely. Legend has it, she caught the eye of their left back despite him having a good decade on her.
Her devotion paid off and eventually, she and her friend were permitted to join the official supporters club. Reportedly to be the first woman to do so and as she signed the paperwork before her mate, maybe the actual first. However, as Jean told me later, the only reason it happened was because they needed someone to make the tea at the meetings. But she was breaking barriers even if it was just supporting her club. It was completely unheard of for women to be seen at the football but it wasn’t exactly common either.
All of this was going on under the FA’s ban of women playing football on their grounds. We all know the story, record crowds for the game in the 20s. Fragile egos led to its ban for 50 years. Famously in 1947, the FA continued to justify its ban as ‘women’s football brings the game into disrepute.’ I don’t think young Jean wanted to be the one kicking the ball about. But that pathway was closed to her, even if it was buried in the back of her mind.
Jean’s Bury journey ended abruptly in the mid-50s when she was sent on a temporary secondment to the London Telephone Exchange. What should have been a six-month jaunt to the big smoke has ended up being over 70 years with the last 20 in Kent. She fell in love with a cheeky cockney chappy and settled down and had three kids, five grandkids including yours truly and four great-grandkids.
Bury had remained a fairly big part of my nan’s life. She still intently checks their results and was heartbroken when they were banished from the league due to bankruptcy.
Just yesterday my mother, her eldest, told me to stop her going to the contentious West Ham fixture against Millwall. Jean told her she was going to take the youngest two to Bury vs Brentford and she had to go. Whether she liked it or not. Ingenious if you ask me.
A key childhood memory for me is going to Colchester United to watch them play and Paddy Kenny ruffled my hair. At least that’s who my parents told me it was. I was an adorable 7-year-old, what can I say?
As one of the only grandchildren at the time to show an interest in all football, I got a Bury shirt for a birthday or Christmas. It was white and blue polyester with the Birthdays sponsorship. Does anyone remember Birthdays or I am showing my age?
So it came full circle last Friday night. As I laced up my boots, onto the pitch warming up in front of a crowd that was easily in double figures. She was all I could think about. The terraces are gone as is most of the ground she would have known. But it’s still in the same location and it’s still Gigg Lane. It was an absolute privilege to play on. Even we only played on a third of it.
We ended up drawing 1-1, which, considering they are second in the league, I will take as a good result.
Jean will never see me play football, she is content whiling away her retirement in Kent. But she has instilled so much of her passion for the game in our family.
The stereotype, of course, is that the love of sports goes from father to son to grandson. In our family, it’s very much mother to daughter to grandchild. Even if we do support vastly different teams.
