County Women Enter a New Era Under Tash Tezgel
Stockport County recently announced the management team to take County Women into the new era. The new Head Coach is Tash Tezgel, who built herself an impressive reputation over the last two seasons at Leafield Athletic in both the FAWNL Division One Midlands and the Women’s FA Cup.
As a player, she spent time as a midfielder with Stoke City and West Brom before beginning her coaching career in the summer of 2023 as assistant to Mike Harris at Stourbridge FC. Along with Tash as First Team Coach comes Luke Beardsmore, who was her assistant at Leafield.
The third appointment is Steve Appleton, previously manager of local rivals Cheadle Town Stingers, who joins County as Head of Football. He will assist Tash in her job as Head Coach as well as overseeing recruitment and managing player development from grassroots level to the first team. His wide experience includes time as a football coach in the prison service in this country and overseas. Since leaving the service, he’s helped to build a women’s team in Qatar and after returning to this country he’s worked at Liverpool Feds, Stoke City and Huddersfield.
With the increase in importance of women’s football at County and in the country generally, it’s a good time to look back at the history of the sport. Records show women playing organised games as far back as the 1880s but they seem to have been more of a curiosity than an actual competition and sometimes had to be abandoned after pitch invasions.
As the century neared its end, interest grew and the game became associated with the movement for women’s rights. The first world war saw a greater number of women working in factories and the authorities recognised that sport and general physical exercise could help maintain fitness and morale. This led to the formation of women’s works football teams, that of Dick, Kerr & Co. in Preston being perhaps the best known.
This growth continued after the armistice and the women’s game attracted serious crowds at the start of the 1920s. Once men returned to the labour market after the war, however, they replaced women in the traditional male roles in the factories, which meant there was a smaller pool of women to continue the works teams.
This, combined with suggestions that football could be an unsuitable recreation for the fairer sex, led to a ban on women’s games at grounds affiliated to the Football Association. Despite being marginalised in this way, the game continued to thrive on parks, rugby venues and non-FA grounds.
There was an obvious need for a national governing body to run the women’s game and in 1969 the Women’s Football Association was formed at a meeting of 44 clubs. Even the suits at the FA couldn’t resist the rise of the women’s game forever, and in June 1971 the ban was lifted. This allowed the domestic game to grow even further and also raised the possibility of international competition. The first match for England Women was against Scotland in 1972, England running out 3-2 winners.
The first national league began in 1991 and rapidly expanded to three divisions of ten teams (Premier, Division 1 North and Division 1 South). Two years later, the FA Women’s Premier League was born.
The world governing body of the sport, FIFA, were also waking up to growth of the women’s game and the first Women’s World Cup was played in 1991. The success of the England side and Team GB at the 2012 London Olympics brought a dramatic increase in awareness of the sport and in 2017 the pinnacle of the domestic game went professional with the formation of the Women’s Super League and WSL2.
As members of the Co-op learned when we met with Tracey Neville some months ago, her ambition is for County Women to work their way up to WSL2 level in the fulness of time.
Author: John K Bilsbury