FA Women’s Super League

Ladies last: the unjust double demotion of Sunderland AFC’s Lasses

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Photo – old strip as you can tell – courtesy of Sunderland AFC Ladies

Imagine Watford or West Ham in the Premier League, and QPR and Nottingham Forest in the Championship, being told they were no longer wanted in their respective divisions despite having achieved safety in relative comfort.

Couldn’t happen, you’re thinking. Now consider the fate of the Sunderland Ladies football team. In wretched circumstances, victims of penny-pinching cuts wielded at Ellis Short’s bidding by our equally unmissed CEO, Martin Bain, they finished seventh top in the Women’s Super League , the highest English division in the female game.

And their reward for such sterling efforts: booted out by the FA. And not even allowed to compete in the WSL second tier, or Championship.

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Sunderland to shake the Women’s Super League. Hail our conquering heroines

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Photo courtesy of the Sunderland Women's Football Club*
Photo courtesy of the Sunderland Women’s Football Club*

What a pleasure, after a season of such disappointment for Sunderland AFC, to be able to congratulate a team in our red and white stripes. Sunderland Women’s Football Club again won the Premier title and this time the FA could find no spurious reason to justify shutting the door of the Super League to them. We asked Paul Dobson – Sobs of A Love Supreme fame and also one of this site’s great friends – to write about the exploits of a side he occasionally watches in action. It appears at Salut! Sunderland as Monsieur Salut’s younger daughter, Nathalie, prepares to line up with her London-based team Old Actonians for a friendly against Toulon in the south of France (minus “Sir” Jonny, as my neighbour calls him, absent – as is neighbour – at the French rugby cup final at the Stade de France) …

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