Trudy McCaffery started playing football almost as soon as she could walk. She used to kick a ball on the sidelines when her dad took her to games he refereed.
In her teens, when a boyfriend wanted to buy her a ring, her response wasn't the one he expected.
She asked for a pair of football boots instead.
She laughs as she casts her mind back. "'Blow the ring, just get me the boots!' They were the best football boots I had in all my life.”
Like Trudy, most of the players who travelled with the unofficial England squad to Mexico in 1971 were obsessed with football from an early age.
Many had been banned from ing boys’ teams at school. The only way Gill Sayell, a small, speedy winger, was allowed to play for a local lads’ team was to pretend to be a boy called Billy.
“I can still kicking the ball around on the green when schoolfriends of mine were going out to discos,” she says. “I wasn’t interested in that – just the football.”
Sayell was 14 when she graduated to Thame Ladies, which had been founded in the Oxfordshire town in 1969.
Like other teams, they made do with whatever facilities were to hand, getting changed in the scout hut down the road and, after one particularly muddy game, traipsing through the streets to be hosed down in the cattle market.
An average women’s match would be watched by a couple of dozen people – some of whom happened to stumble across a game in the park.
“It was one man and his dog,” says striker Janice Emms (née Barton), only slightly exaggerating. “Some people who just happened to be there would perhaps stop and watch for five or 10 minutes. But there were hardly any.”
Those who did turn out in were enthusiastic, but some of the casual onlookers were less so.
“You’d get so much abuse from them. They just regarded it as a joke, girls playing football. Nobody took it seriously. We did.”
There had been an earlier time when big crowds did take women's football more seriously, however.
