I WAS BORN Kelly Jayne Smith at Watford General Hospital on 29 October 1978. Grease was the big hit movie of the year, and ‘Summer Nights’ was number one in the pop charts when I arrived in the world, despite it being a cold autumn day in Hertfordshire.
I was the first child of my devoted and loving parents Bernard and Carol. My brother Glen came along two years later and that’s it, that’s my family. I lived in the Garston area of Watford until my late teens, when I moved to the United States to play football. So I am a good old Garston girl through and through.
The first address I lived at in Garston was on Fourth Avenue. I went to Lea Farm Junior School, which was just down the street from us, literally five hundred yards away. So it was an easy walk to school every day as a youngster. Later we moved around the corner to Kilby Close. My parents still live in that same house, number 73, today.
Apparently, as soon as I could walk I had a ball at my feet. Mum and Dad tell me I learned to do both at around the same time. On a family holiday in the early 1980s I was seen trudging around the back garden of this house with a plastic ball, shuffling it along the ground with both feet as I toddled along.
As a girl at primary school I was on my own where football was concerned. Most of the girls spent playtime skipping, and playing tag or kiss-chase. But I was never with the girls at playtime. I was always with the boys, playing football.
We played wall ball and other games together. I forget the exact name of this one game – we called it ‘King of the Square’ or something – but it was all about one-touch football. We also had jumpers for goalposts and played small-sided matches against each other.
There was a big wall at the end of our playground which was very good practice for hitting the ball when you only had one chance to do it. You couldn’t take more than one touch so it was just about knocking the ball and then someone else would come in and knock it after you. You had to try to hit the ball as hard as you could, and if the ball went over the wall you were out.
Sometimes we would get some chalk and draw a triangle, a circle or a square on the wall and try and hit the ball into those target areas. As more of a challenge to myself, I would keep score of how many circles and squares I hit. It was more of a competition against the boys that way.
So without knowing it, I was actually working on my skill set from a very young age. That’s probably why I am so technical today, because I was always in the playground, in the park or in the back garden playing these sorts of games. I really do think that kick-started my development. I don’t think kids these days start off playing those games any more, which is wrong in my view. They seem to play five-a-side a lot but don’t practise their skills enough.
I felt this was what I wanted to do from very early on in my life, and I knew I was good at it. The game came naturally to me at a young age. It wasn’t something I needed to work on. It was a gift. And gender was never an issue at that age. I never felt unwelcome. I did wish that there were other girls playing because then I wouldn’t be the only one. But, sadly, nobody was interested. I suppose it wasn’t the done thing back then.
But then, I wasn’t seen as a girl by the boys at Lea Farm, I was just Kelly. I was just one of the lads. I was always pretty much one of the first players to be picked too. When we stood in line my name was called out early, so that obviously helped me. I fitted in really easily with them and I played in the school team with them. It was cool.
I can clearly remember playing for the school and thinking that the football pitch was absolutely massive – maybe because we were all so small. Playing on those pitches was constant running and hard work for me. Obviously I had to be quick to beat the boys and get past them. And I did that. But once I had beaten them I still had half of a field to dribble down before I could try and score a goal against what seemed to be a little lad standing in a huge goalmouth. It’s funny looking back that the one thing I remember more than anything else from those early days playing football is the size of the pitch.
I played football regularly after school with my friend across the road, Graham Head. He played for Garston Boys Football Club, and one Sunday morning I went down there to watch him play. Out of the blue Dick Bousefield, who ran the team, asked me if I wanted to play for them. I was made up, it all seemed so exciting. I came home and told my dad that I was in the team. The first team kit I ever played in was the blue and black striped shirts and black shorts of Garston Boys.
That is when football first began to feel a little more serious. I was now wearing a proper kit and playing every Sunday morning against the best of the boys in my area.
I looked like a tomboy back then as I had short hair. Not too many people from the other teams knew that I was a girl. I was just a boy playing in a boys’ team, and it carried on like that for a while.
Every Sunday morning without fail I would wake up feeling excited. I was always up early because I knew I was going to be playing football. I can clearly remember dew on the grass and every detail associated with those mornings, on this big football pitch, doing what I loved.
I was always a midfielder or a striker. And at that age I stood out because I was really good with the ball at my feet and dribbling around players, which some of the boys in the team couldn’t do. They just weren’t as good as me technically so I got noticed a little bit. It was just a lot easier for me to control the ball at my feet than it was for them, and I remember dribbling a lot and scoring a lot of goals for them.
The natural talent was there, but I never stopped training. At home, I had now moved on to kicking the ball up above my head, controlling it and bringing it down. I would also put cones out in a row and do some tight dribbling in and around them. I would practise with a golf ball as well, because it was a lot smaller, and working with it improved my touch. I would play with balls of different sizes and different weights and it all helped to develop my touch.
Garston Boys played eleven-a-side, but it wasn’t competitive, just friendlies. I think they got on the phone and arranged their own fixtures as they went along. We played ten teams or so, home and away, from September until the end of the year, then come January new fixtures would be arranged until May.
I remember a game against a side called Evergreen when my dad was standing at the side of the pitch with a man he used to go to school with called Barry Frankham, who was a physio at Barnet at one time. Barry asked him, ‘Is your boy out there, Bernard?’ And my dad just shook his head, said no, and told him his daughter was. When Barry found out which one I was, he called out to his son, ‘Hey Kevin, that’s a girl running rings around you!’ That’s an example of the sort of thing that used to happen in those days.
But I hit my first real problem in football when Garston Boys came to play the teams again in the second half of the season. Suddenly nobody would give us a game if I was playing. As I said, I did dominate a lot of the matches and people were obviously aware of that now. Although, to be honest, I think Dad and I were at first maybe a little bit oblivious to how the skills I had at that stage could stand out on the pitch.
Dick came up to my dad and told him that they had to let me go because they couldn’t get any teams to play them. Dad was told that because the games were friendlies there was nothing anybody could do, so that was that.
I was devastated. But when I told the boys at my school what had happened they quickly arranged for me to have a trial at a football club they all played for called Herons. I went along, got selected and played for them for a bit before a similar thing happened down there.
I knew football would continue to be my main sport, though. I lived and breathed it.
I enjoyed other sports too. At the Francis Combe School, which I attended from the age of eleven, I particularly loved Physical Education lessons. I wanted to be active all the time, not just with PE and football but hockey, netball, athletics and rounders as well.
I wasn’t so hot on maths. I hated maths. I used to bunk off maths.
We used to have a maths lesson lasting an hour and a half every Monday morning, which I absolutely hated. So I would avoid it at all costs. My Aunt Beryl, my dad’s sister, lived around the corner on Coates Way, about fifteen minutes’ walk from school. I would leave home as normal but take the key to my aunt’s house with me and stop there for a bit during maths. My aunt would already be at work so she never knew about it. I don’t think any of my family knew about it! I would just sit there, have some biscuits and watch whatever was on the television, This Morning or whatever. I would make it look as though I hadn’t been there, of course. I would make sure I put the biscuits back exactly right. If I had a blackcurrant juice I would wipe the cup so there were no stains on it and put it back in the cupboard. I would eventually take myself off to school and bowl up to my next lesson. I would just say I’d had a dentist appointment or something. Nothing ever happened about it.
I was crap at maths. I really struggled with it. I didn’t understand why you had to know algebra and ˟ = 1 and all stupid stuff like that. It just did not sit well with my brain. So that was my biggest challenge at school. I didn’t mind English and most other subjects. But PE was always my favourite. I just liked being around the PE staff because they were cool people to hang out with. I also knew I was good at sport so I thrived on it.
Football was the game I continued to excel at, but I was also good at netball and I had county trials in that sport while I was at Francis Combe. I liked netball because it was quite similar to football in many respects (apart from using your hands obviously), such as speed of play. It was a fast-paced game with quick one-touch movement but I played goal defence so I was mainly stopping the shots from the opposition rather than scoring goals. If football had not existed it is possible I would have focused on netball because I did enjoy playing it. I hated wearing the skirt though. That wasn’t me. I would much rather wear a pair of shorts.
Football was always the winner for me. I was always playing football in the house or in the back garden, often with my brother. We had a soft foam ball and we would use the couches for goalposts and play one-on-one. When we broke ornaments and stuff that game got banished, so we used a balloon instead. It was always Glen and me going against each other. It was good fun.
Indoors or outdoors, I always felt very comfortable with a ball at my feet. I would juggle a hacky sack and knock balls against the garage shed; I would play keepy-uppy by myself and do dribbles in the garden, around the swing, pretending I was on a football field.
Keepy-uppy became a bit of an obsession with me. I used to love counting them all up to see if I could beat my existing record. I would set myself targets too: when I got to fifty, my next goal would be to get to fifty-five. I seemed to spend all my spare time out in the back garden constantly playing with a ball, juggling it or heading it, trying to reach ever higher numbers.
My interest in watching professional football didn’t come through Dad but his friend, Russ Crowson. He was the person who took me to my first match, and that was at Highbury. He was an Arsenal fan and I went along with him. I became an Arsenal fan pretty much through that.
It was the early 1990s and Arsenal were on their way to winning the league title again with a great side that included Tony Adams, David O’Leary, Lee Dixon, Nigel Winterburn, Alan Smith, Paul Merson and Paul Davis. I always loved watching Ian Wright too. He joined the Gunners a little later. I liked him so much because of the way he played the game. He wasn’t perhaps the most talented footballer but his energy and buzz, and that smile on his face, were just fantastic. He loved to celebrate goals and he always played with such enthusiasm. You could tell that he loved the game, that he was passionate about it. He was the main player for Arsenal for a long time, scoring all the goals.
Wright was my hero, but the player I really wanted to be like was Ryan Giggs. I moulded myself on him. He was left-footed, I was left-footed. He was a winger, I was a winger. He was a good, fast dribbler, I was a good, fast dribbler. He could beat players, I could beat players. He could pick out a cross, and so could I. I saw similarities between him and me, and from the age of thirteen or fourteen I started to try to be more like him.
The Premier League had just started and Manchester United were dominant. I religiously videotaped Match of the Day and specifically looked out for Giggs. He would do a move, a turn or a cross during a game and I would literally rewind the tape for hours and practise the same moves with a ball at my feet in my parents’ front room. I did that constantly, every day, every week. Time and time again. Mum and Dad would be busy doing their thing – maybe Mum was doing the ironing, maybe Dad was at work – and I would come home from school, put the video on and do that.
There was one boy I remember playing against when I was young who later went on to play against Ryan Giggs. Paul Robinson, who played for St Michael’s School at the time, is the same age as me and he played left-back for Watford and West Bromwich Albion before moving on to Bolton Wanderers. He has also been on loan at Leeds United. He now has over five hundred senior appearances to his name, including 227 in the Premier League.
A few years ago the England women’s team trained at Bolton before an international match, and as I was getting off the bus I saw Paul and we had a catch-up. He has done really well for himself and carved out a good professional career, which is great. But he is the only boy I played against in my schooldays who made it professionally. There were a couple of other lads who probably could have done but they gave up a long time ago and are now pursuing different careers.
I never gave up, even though after getting kicked off both the Garston Boys and Herons teams I’d decided not to play with or against boys any more. It just didn’t feel right. Parents of boys from other teams didn’t like the fact that I was a girl, so I couldn’t play. I was so upset by that because people were effectively saying that I couldn’t do something that I absolutely loved; even worse, they were actively stopping me from doing it.
Looking back, I suppose it was a bit embarrassing for some parents because I was a girl scoring goals in a boys’ match. It was a problem for them to see a girl like me dominating a game featuring their sons. The whole thing soured so quickly. It went from ‘Who is this wonder kid?’ to ‘Get her off the team!’ There was uproar. I was even shouted at by adults on the touchline at matches and all sorts. It was all very sad and an awful experience for a youngster to go through.
As I had decided that what I wanted to do with my life was play football, Dad approached Watford Ladies. They had no facilities for girls’ football but they remained the best option for me at that time. They had a five-a-side team and they played in a league, so I played with them – me, still a girl, and four grown women. They were big women too, aged somewhere between eighteen and thirty I would guess.
I remember going to Ipswich for a five-a-side tournament and they decided to put me in goal so that I wouldn’t get hurt! That was their decision, not mine. I wanted to play out on the pitch, but I suppose they were right, I would have got killed. We got to the final and lost 1–0. It was the only goal I conceded that day. I was pleased with my performances and quite domineering in my own little way, protecting my goal. But all the time all I wanted to do was get out on that pitch and show these women what I could do. It’s a funny memory because I was so small compared to all the other Watford ladies.
There were boys’ teams and there were women’s teams but there were no girls’ teams on the scene until a lady called Jackie Burns, wife of manager Norman Burns, called my dad one night and told him about Pinner Park. Norman was running a girls’ team there and he wanted me to join them. My dad and I were apprehensive about it. We didn’t know anything about them. But Debbie Garvey, who had just joined Watford Ladies and was a similar age to me, did know about them.
In the end, both Debbie and I moved to Pinner Park. We were both playing five-a-side for Watford Ladies at the time so that created some animosity between the two teams. Watford didn’t like the idea that Pinner Park had taken two young girls from them, despite us being out of our depth over there really. There were simply no facilities for youth football there. At Pinner Park I could play with and against girls of my own age, which suited me much better.
We regularly got to the final of a five-a-side competition which was organized by the Metropolitan Police and held at Wembley Arena every year. That was a very big thing. The former England goalkeeper Ray Clemence presented the trophies. We won that tournament three or four times on the trot. We had a fantastic team, with girls from all over London playing for us. Nobody could touch us.
Pinner Park had progressed to playing eleven-a-side football as well, in the Greater London league. So we played regularly in both five-a-side and eleven-a-side competitions and we became one of the best teams around. Arsenal would have a team in those events as well. Deep down, I always hoped that I would get spotted by Arsenal. But I never heard anything from them and I wasn’t the type of person to do anything about it on my own.
I spent about four or five years at Pinner Park in all. It was a good solid grounding for me. Eventually the side amalgamated with Wembley Ladies after Norman moved over to join them. So, essentially, Pinner Park became Wembley Ladies Reserves.
John Jones, who managed Wembley Ladies, wanted me in the first team more or less straight away. But I was still only fifteen years old and just about to sit my GCSE exams at school. We spoke to Norman about it all. He advised me to stay in the reserves for a little while, so that is what I did. As soon as my exams were out of the way and I was heading towards further education, I joined up with the first team at Wembley.
It wasn’t the sort of life my heroes like Ian Wright were having but it was as good as it could get for a woman who wanted to be a footballer. The Football Association had finally assumed responsibility for the administration and organization of the women’s national league – it was renamed the FA Women’s Premier League in 1994 – and the cup competitions. The new league set-up comprised three levels with ten teams in each one. Wembley Ladies were in the top division, so that was good.
But women’s football remained an amateur sport in England, and that meant, in essence, that I played it in my spare time, fitting it in around my studies. I had no choice. The game was not what I had hoped or imagined it could be when I was a young girl. There was certainly no money in it.
In fact we had to pay to play the game. At the start of each season I had to hand over a fee, for referees, pitches and so on. It may have had ‘Premier League’ in its title but it certainly didn’t feel Premier League to me.