Given that Portsmouth Women won promotion under Jay Sadler's stewardship last season at roughly around the same time as the men wrapped up the League One title, its perhaps not entirely surprising that both initially struggled to make the step up. However, John Mousinho's boys have given themselves a fighting chance with a good recent run of form, particularly at home, to take themselves up to seventeenth in the table after a long while spent looking up.
The ladies, though, find themselves second bottom of the Women's Championship having won just one game all season pre- international break, away at Sheffield United around a month ago. They did then immediately double their winning tally in the middle of March, with a home win over Sunderland, but they’re very much in danger of an immediate return to the National League South having set more than a few unwanted records.
Fourteen games without a win and the three highest defeats of the season! A 5-0 derby day spanking at home to Southampton in October of last year in front of a Fratton Park crowd, and then at their usual nominal home ground, Havant and Waterlooville's West Leigh Park, when Charlton Athletic's ladies took all three points back to South London with them having stuck another five past Pompey, a game I took in alongside my family, wanting to show Imogen, our youngest, that girls can play too (and she does, with Pompey in the Community).
Sadly, the biggest defeat of the lot came in the most recent game for the Pompey Women, when they travelled to Durham on Mother’s Day and were hit for six by The Wildcats. The team have a three point buffer over bottom place and relegation, with two games left of the season, but the club currently looking at the drop, Sheffield United, have a game in hand.
The question that kept me (perhaps morbidly and, in hindsight, thankfully) curious enough to return for the home game with Sunderland- again at Fratton Park- with the newest addition to the blue ranks in tow, is it the relatively recent adoption of a fully professional model as of June 2023. Something which also brought with it a reshuffle at boardroom level as former chairman Eric Coleborn moved aside for Jane Eisner.
“After winning promotion to the Championship and having our licence granted by the FA, we are now absolutely thrilled to announce that Pompey Women will become fully professional.
This is an exciting time for women’s football in Portsmouth and across the United Kingdom, and I am grateful to Jane and Michael Eisner, and the Portsmouth Women board, for their increased investment in our women’s team.
This will have a huge impact on our competitiveness in a higher division, as well as enabling our players to achieve their dreams of becoming professional footballers for the first time in their lives.”
So said club CEO Andy Cullen once the step up was sealed, a rapid ascent given they were only even semi-professional just the summer before, a cash injection from the Eisner family helping bring the club in line with the rest of the Championship, now made up mostly exclusively of fully pro clubs. But perhaps there is an element of too much too soon behind the struggles out there on the pitch at Havant, players finding it tough to adjust to the demands of football as a full time concern rather than something for the weekend?
The History of Women’s Football in Portsmouth
Certainly, it's a far cry from the state they were in following the reformation of what it's probably prudent to call the “modern” Portsmouth Women in 1987, the “original” club having been founded as far back as 1914. They were mostly playing charity matches for the war effort before becoming an official entity and indeed Hampshire's first "official" ladies' football team two years later. No doubt glad to finally be rid of the humiliation of playing friendlies against local men's teams with absurd rules apparently designed to favour the fairer sex- goalies for the chaps having to keep one arm inside their shirts and outfielders called upon to play with hands tied behind their backs among the retrospectively outright bizarre stipulations of the day (it probably won't surprise you to learn that of the fourteen such games on record, the embryonic Pompey ladies drew one and won thirteen)!
It wasn't until the late Sixties, though, that a more equivalent forebear to the club we know today first arose, as John Phelps, then the PR head for the men, helped the women he'd originally employed as matchday hostesses at Fratton Park to start a team of their own. Mick Williams of the Pompey Action supporters group was also heavily involved in the endeavour, though records of matches played on the hallowed turf appear somewhat scarce thanks to an FA ban on women playing football on affiliated clubs' pitches.
Something which, barely believably, lasted around fifty years from 1921-71, though Pompey did at least allow early women's games to be advertised in the men's matchday programmes of the era. In an interesting side note, the women now get one of their own, albeit a much shorter read than anyone who'd gone to the men's most recent home fixture at time of writing, the 1-0 home win over Blackburn Rovers, their latest gallant attempt to put daylight between themselves and the Championship relegation places...
The sense of kinship with the men's side of things has seemingly been a constant where the Blues are concerned, things kicking up a notch by 1987 with Dave Coyle pulling the strings as the women entered into the Southern Regional League in time for the 1988/89 season, Coyle in the dugout by the time they won promotion to the South West Combination around ten years later.
Sadly, the man who did so much to get them to the point at which they find themselves now isn't around to see it, having succumbed to cancer in 2016. His old mate and former chairman didn’t miss the opportunity to pay tribute to him in announcing the news that the ladies would become a full part of the parent club as recently as 2018, with his standing in the women's game also marked by a minute's silence at all Women's Premier League matches on the Sunday after his passing.
And it goes without saying that minus the likes of Phelps, Williams and Coyle, not to mention the staff under their watch and those who came before them, the club they helped shape could so easily have been a relic of a bygone age. That the Eisners have such solid foundations on which to build is testament to the foundations laid by those who came well before their money and indeed changes further up the pyramid. The FA being eased out by NewCo as of January last year fundamentally changed the league structure in an attempt to bring a degree of parity with the men, probably the biggest at least domestically. It remains to be seen if Pompey shall be under their aegis for much longer... though they have at least played their part in seeing “women's football transformed”.