It’s confirmed: Marta is leaving Umeå IK for Los Angeles Sol in the Women’s Professional Soccer league. Her Umeå teammate, Johanna Frisk, is also said to be “close to signing a contract” with the same club; whilst Marta’s Brazil strike partner, Cristiane, is joining the Chicago Red Stars. Good luck!

In less exciting news, I can’t believe that one of the best women footballers in the world has to beg for more time on the pitch. Will a Great Britain Olympics football team happen? Not bloody likely. I appreciate the political history that led to the current situation, but it’s a crying shame that the players (probably) won’t get the time on the pitch that they need. And then you get these people moaning and whinging about how their pub team would totally beat a women’s team so why bother with the women’s game, but won’t bloody support any policy that’ll allow for an environment where women players have just as many opportunities as men players to sharpen their skills.

More news ahead when I get settled in again.

Melbourne Victory will face Perth Glory on Saturday looking to make up for the Round 2 defeat by Sydney FC (ouch). This is the one televised W-League match on the ABC this weekend, though with tickets priced at $5 per adult I don’t think I’m being unreasonable in bloody well hoping that people’ll turn up to cheer on Victory Women.

Perth Glory also goes into the match fresh off a defeat to the Central Coast Mariners. Both the Mariners and their opponent this weekend, Canberra United, will be looking forward to the return of their young players from the Asian U-19 Women’s Football Championship qualifiers. Canberra especially will be hoping its three Young Matildas will be able to start, with Caitlin Munoz out a few weeks due to a knee ligament strain and Amy Chapman not entirely fit.

League topper Sydney FC will travel to Adelaide looking to consolidate its lead — and I say this with no bitterness (really), but Sydney looks to be the favourite to win the inaugural W-League title. Newcastle Jets will play at home against Queensland Roar, with Roar’s Jenna Tristram having the misfortune of being the W-League’s first major injury casualty so far this season.

FourFourTwo Australia has its usual W-League preview here. Fiona Crawford’s most recent post for the W-League blog at the site picked up on an issue I think some of us have been muttering into our drinks about:

With just one W-League match broadcast per week it’s incredibly difficult for women (and men) to consistently follow their chosen teams (not to mention for me to report on them) and I do wonder: If you can’t see it, can you support it?

I’m not ungrateful. I repeat, I am not ungrateful that the ABC broadcast the match. I am indescribably appreciative that they have stepped up to the plate and are broadcasting any matches at all. I am simply, Oliver Twist-ly saying that ‘Please sir, I want some more’.

The ABC half-time break broadcast includes highlights from the other matches, which is fantastic, but which also begs the question: If they’re able to show highlights, someone must be recording the games — is it not possible to televise them, even if it’s over the web or in the wee, TV-wasteland hours of the morning?

The Queensland Roar v Adelaide United match commanded 125,000 viewers, out-rating the A-League. Ah, the magic of putting football on free-to-air TV. Like Fiona I’m not saying that the ABC’s doing a shitty job, but one broadcast per weekend is too cautious an investment even for a league still in its infancy. When all’s said and done, yes, you’ve got to still put backsides on the seats in stadiums (though a proper stadium atmosphere is a bit of an ask right now when you’ve got teams being shunted off here and there) — can’t do that without publicity, can you? We’ve still got a long way to go, but there’s reason for optimism so let’s get this thing right from the get-go.

Maybe this is an opportunity for fans to put their hands in and get things going, because waiting for the ABC to broadcast a second match every weekend could take a while (I’m not even going to talk about how the FFA and A-League clubs dropped the ball on the W-League). I think Canberra is a great example of community organising around the W-League: support from other football codes and a community radio filling in the gaps by way of podcasts and a live commentary of Canberra United v Central Coast Mariners streamed online.

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.

Highlights of Perth Glory v Sydney FC:

QUT News segment on Queensland Roar Women and the W-League, prior to the opening fixtures:

• 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.

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.

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.

“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.

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?

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)

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