Weekend W-League preview October 30, 2008
Posted by lem in League, News.Tags: Adelaide United, Canberra United, Melbourne Victory, Newcastle Jets, Sydney FC, W-League
3 comments
Them’s fighting words, Heather Garriock. 
Incidentally we find out via Marlies Oostdam’s second diary entry that prior to their first match, Melbourne Victory trained on astroturf all week instead of actual grass(!). I hope they’d managed some training time on a grass surface prior to the match in Parramatta Stadium, because I doubt Sydney FC will give them the breathing room to adjust.
Canberra United will travel to Perry Park without their experienced midfielder Caitlin Munoz, who is out for three weeks due to a knee ligament strain.
Both Newcastle Jets and Adelaide United will be without a number of players on international duty for their match at Hindmarsh Stadium, played as the curtain raiser to the men’s Adelaide United v Melbourne Victory. Among the Jets players travelling to Adelaide is Rhali Dobson, who almost didn’t make it into the squad after injury ruled her out of the initial tryouts.
Get your W-League squad info, times and locations for this weekend’s fixtures here.
Moving pictures October 28, 2008
Posted by lem in League, Videos.Tags: Perth Glory, Queensland Roar, Sydney FC, W-League
add a comment
Highlights of Perth Glory v Sydney FC:
QUT News segment on Queensland Roar Women and the W-League, prior to the opening fixtures:
Consolidating links October 28, 2008
Posted by lem in League, News, Tournaments.Tags: Canada, Iceland, New Zealand, Queensland Roar, Republic of Ireland, Russia, Scotland, Sydney FC, U-17 Women's World Cup, W-League
add a comment
- If you live in any of these countries, you can watch the U-17 Women’s World Cup live and for free via
Fifa.com TV. I believe that Eurosport will be airing the matches, otherwise your best bet is the daily video highlights at the Fifa website. - The host nation of the U-17 Women’s World Cup, New Zealand, today narrowly lost to Canada in the tournament’s opening match.
- Scotland narrowly lost to Russia in the first leg of their Euro 2009 qualifying play-off (The Scotsman’s report of the play-off, I note, is as replete with understated fatalism as any match report concerning the men’s team). The Republic of Ireland, however, drew 1-1 with Iceland — a nation ranked 10 places higher than Ireland.
- FourFourTwo Australia is running a series of fan blogs for clubs in the Australian national leagues: Fiona Crawford blogs on Queensland Roar’s debut match in the W-League.
- Sydney FC currently sits on top of the W-League on goal difference. Sports traditionalists in Australia are eyeing the growth of football with considerable skepticism, so here’s to the women proving doubters wrong.
First round of W-League: results October 26, 2008
Posted by lem in League, News.Tags: Marlies Oostdam, Melbourne Victory, Rebecca Tegg, W-League
add a comment
Briefly:
Melbourne Victory wins its first match against Central Coast Mariners with two goals in the second half, scored by Marlies Oostdam and Rebecca Tegg. Here’s to the match against Sydney FC next week — will the derby feel carry over to the women’s teams? (More so now after Sydney won on Melbourne soil in a league fixture for the first time in the men’s game, drawing criticism from the Melbourne captain against his team.)
Sydney FC gave Perth Glory a 4-0 thumping, while Queensland Roar aren’t far behind with their 4-1 win over Adelaide United. In today’s fixture, Newcastle Jets just about managed to see off Canberra United.
“I can’t believe I missed it” plug: If you’d like a handy W-League guide to print and keep, World Football Programme has a downloadable guide in pdf format that includes information on all the teams and a fixture list.
W-League links round-up: Victory edition October 24, 2008
Posted by lem in League, News.Tags: Marlies Oostdam, Melbourne Victory, Sophie Hogben, Tal Karp, W-League
add a comment
Tal Karp (left) and Melissa Barbieri at the launch of Melbourne Victory Women. Picture by Aidan Ormond.
FourFourTwo Australia’s W-League preview for this weekend’s matches.
Tal Karp is Melbourne Victory Women’s captain for the inaugural season. I would’ve been happy with Barbieri as the women’s team’s first captain for entirely parochial reasons, but I can see why she was selected. Karp has an arts/law degree from the ANU and coached the Australian girls’ junior team for the JCC Games in 2006.
The women’s team section of the official Melbourne Victory website is looking more lively now with a number of news articles and a diary entry from our Kiwi defender, Marlies Oostdam.
Congratulations to midfielder Sophie Hogben, who was selected to be part of the U-19 Matildas team to play in the upcoming AFC U-19 Women’s Championship qualifiers.
Kevin Muscat, the men’s team captain, has urged Victory supporters to come to this weekend’s fixture and support the women’s team.
Over in the mother country October 21, 2008
Posted by lem in News, Tournaments.Tags: Chelsea Ladies, Euro 2009, homophobia, Scotland, Women's Premier League
add a comment
“Apart from the money we’ve got through Rovers’ brilliant efforts, we’ve got practically nothing coming into the club. It’s got to the point where we recently had a bucket collection at a Rovers match. Our players, some of them internationals, were begging in the rain to get cash for us to meet our bills.” — Jonathan James, Doncaster Belles chairperson
Doncaster Belles will stay afloat until January thanks to a fundraising match by the Doncaster Rovers, but still desperately need sponsors. Things look rather bleak for the Women’s Premier League’s oldest club — I hope they won’t end up going the way of Charlton Athletic, who managed to find new sponsors but too late to retain most of their best players.
Chelsea’s Danni Buet has been awarded the Women’s Premier League Player of the Month Award for September. Congratulations!
There’s more to look forward to this weekend apart from the W-League: Scotland will meet Russia in the first of a two-legged play-off to determine which side will progress to the Euro 2009 finals. Scotland has never made the play-offs before (they defeated Slovakia to make it this year) and, if successful, they’ll be in the finals for the first time.
A point of interest: England FA to take on homophobic abuse? One summit does not a concrete commitment make.
Australia’s most consistent team? I think so October 21, 2008
Posted by lem in News, Tournaments.Tags: AFF Women's Championships, Australia, Vietnam, W-League
add a comment
The Matildas have won the ASEAN Football Federation Women’s Championships, with a little luck from an own goal by Vietnam’s Do Thi Ngoc Cham. Reports from Vietnamese sources were more detailed than Ye Olde Generic Press Releases, yielding a match report and reactions from both coaches on the Vietnamese team.
I can’t wait for the weekend! More on the people who made the W-League happen — and may I say that the comments to the news article gave me a little more hope for the future?
Melissa Barbieri October 20, 2008
Posted by lem in Goalkeepers, News.Tags: Australia, Melbourne Victory, Melissa Barbieri, W-League
3 comments
The Australian W-League will kick off this weekend with a match between Perth Glory and Sydney FC. A total of eight teams will take part in its inaugural season, including Canberra United. Due to the short length of the season — and, let’s admit it, the low likelihood of making a living wage — a number of Australian players will be playing their trade in two to three leagues per year, e.g. Heather Garriock, who’ll also be playing in Denmark and the US.
W-League matches will be broadcast on free-to-air TV, with the ABC screening one live match per weekend. Not as sweet a deal as one might’ve hoped for, but at least its availability on free-to-air will help publicise the league, coming in at the right time to take advantage of new sources of funding.
(Incidentally, what say you about the FFA’s marketing for the W-League?)
The Matildas meet Vietnam tonight in the finals of the ASEAN Football Federation Women’s Championships. Good luck!
Cute-as-a-bug goalkeeper Melissa Barbieri won’t be playing in the match — Lydia Williams will — but given the launch of the W-League I think it’s high time that I fulfill my promise of pictures.
Melissa Barbieri nearly didn’t go on to play football for Melbourne Victory and Australia at all. She was misdiagnosed with a back injury in 2000, after she’d already made it to the Matildas training squad as a midfielder. Told she would never play football again, Barbieri refused to give up and asked, “What if I don’t run around so much?” — and made the switch between the sticks.
It took two years for Barbieri to establish herself as the Matildas’ #1 goalkeeper.
Barbieri was the first player signed by Melbourne Victory’s women’s team, and playing for the club also holds something of a special significance: she worked for Melbourne Victory’s medical staff three years ago.
Photo by Tony Gough (click for a bigger version)
More under the jump:
Woohoo! October 6, 2008
Posted by lem in News.Tags: Australia, England, W-League, Women's Premier League
add a comment
The W-League fixtures have been announced. For those of you too impatient to download the pdf file, Football in the Capital has put up the draw in this post. Canberra United, incidentally, is the only W-League team not affiliated with an A-League team.
I see that the first Melbourne-Sydney derby of this W-League season will take place in Round 2. I have great hopes for it, though I’m rather worried about the little-advertised recruitment for Melbourne’s women’s team. (Speaking of Melbourne Victory, look out for a Melissa Barbieri post very soon.)
Meanwhile, in England: murmurs of unease over details of the summer women’s league.
A tale of two countries October 5, 2008
Posted by lem in News.Tags: England, Germany, United States, Women's Premier League, Women's Professional Soccer
add a comment
“Arsenal is my club and I love it more than anything else, it’s in my blood, but I want to be the best coach in the world and that’s why I came here. This country loves women’s football. Loves it.” — Emma Hayes on her decision to leave for the Chicago Red Stars
Anne Kessel (who is fighting the good fight for coverage of women’s football) has a thoughtful article in today’s Guardian on the WPS draft and its effect on women footballers in England, and the frustrating shortcomings of the FA’s approach to the development of the women’s game. Over in the US, people involved in the new league are talking up their awareness of what’s at stake. I hate that after so many accolades for the US team in international tournaments, there’s still so much hard work ahead to establish a league whose sustainability may yet be fragile, but as the example of Germany shows, World Cup trophies are no guarantor for a thriving women’s club football.
That said, I am so fucking excited for the WPS and the Australian W-League (Melbourne! Melbourne!). I won’t be able to watch the matches live on TV where I am, so it’s a heigh-ho, it’s off to streams and torrents I go.
