SLOWLY BUT SURELY women’s football had risen in prominence back in Great Britain during the seven years I had been away. In 2002 it had become the most participated-in female sport in the country, taking over from netball, and ten years on we are set for our first foray into the Olympic Games. It is an exciting position for us to have got to after all these years of struggle and steady improvement.
And believe me, it has been some journey for us to get here, both on and off the pitch. The Football Association has done a tremendous amount of work in terms of the development of the sport. The England coach Hope Powell has been absolutely immense. She deserves the most credit.
Media interest has increased significantly. England have reached two Women’s World Cup quarter-finals in a row now – in 2007 and 2011 – plus the final of Women’s Euro 2009. We successfully hosted the finals of Euro 2005 too.
To polish it all off, in 2011 the Women’s Super League – an elite summer league for women’s football in England was finally launched after many years of hopes and talks. The Olympics will be a fitting climax to ten years’ hard work and welcome growth. I can’t wait for it, and I dearly hope that I am able to play in it.
My often-used quotation that ‘women’s football in England is a joke’, or whatever I was supposed to have said while I was out in America in the early 2000s, has caused me a fair bit of grief over the years. As I’ve already said in this book, I can’t actually remember saying those words but I stand by them because the statement was more or less true at that time and that is how I felt, particularly when you compared the sport in our country to what was going on across the pond.
One of the reasons why I felt so strongly about things was because I was training every day in the States and I was feeling like I was getting better and becoming more established because I was on the ball every day rather than hanging around a training ground waiting to train just twice a week. I realized that this approach had made a big difference to me. The limited amount of training was what frustrated me most at that time about women’s teams in England. I needed to be working with a ball much more than that, and I’m sure the rest of the England team were feeling that too.
On those two nights a week they would have to work on their fitness as well, running without a ball and what have you. So they would get limited playing time too. That is the main reason why I felt the game was lagging behind in England. I saw all that stuff as an example of people not taking the game seriously enough. Two nights per week just wasn’t good enough for me. I suppose because I was already a professional player and the game in England was still semi-professional, it all felt stale to me. I hope that people can now appreciate that.
I was the only overseas player in the England team. A few years after me, Danielle Murphy and Rachel Brown came out to the States to study and play. But at the time of my comment I was out there on my own so those particular thoughts were exclusive to me. That’s why they made the press, I guess. I didn’t intend to knock the system, I just spoke from my heart, voiced my feelings. It was what I felt. It was what I knew.
I returned regularly to England to play international games. I didn’t go back for too many friendlies, but I was always there – when fit and able – to play in important qualification matches for Women’s World Cups and European Championships.
That was a really hard thing to do when I was studying for my degree at Seton Hall. I was juggling two lives separated by the vast Atlantic Ocean, and it wasn’t easy. It was tiring, and it made keeping up with my studies a difficult task. While I was away travelling I was, of course, away from college and therefore missing lectures over maybe a seven- to ten-day period, which would leave me playing catch-up when I got back for weeks afterwards. But I did it for the love of the game and, importantly, the love of my country. It was just the price I had to pay if I wanted to study and play in America and play for England as well.
Travelling like that in any job takes a toll after a while, though. Physically you grow very tired from jet lag and things like that. In fact, being a sportsperson and doing that is probably worse than other professions, for obvious reasons.
There was never any assurance that I was going to play in those games either. I did play in most of them, but I could easily have travelled all the way to England and then sat the game out on the bench. I never knew until I arrived with the squad whether I was in the team or not.
The drinking didn’t help either. Before I admitted to myself that I had a drinking problem and spent some time in recovery at Sporting Chance, I once bought a bottle of wine from a supermarket while on England duty and had a drink in my hotel room after the match. With the game out of the way, I could relax knowing that I could now drink that bottle of wine and be out of it afterwards. Nobody ever said anything to me about it. Then again, I don’t think anybody in any form of authority knew anything about it at that time.
There always seemed to be a lot of talk about a possible professional women’s league in England in the early 2000s. But it didn’t happen. Fulham Ladies were geared up for it – they put players like Katie Chapman and Rachel Yankey on proper full-time contracts – but that venture soon fell away, sadly.
The FA Women’s Cup final was covered live on BBC One in 2002 as part of the FA’s new television deal. It remained on BBC One for seven years. That was a very important step for the game and an important mark of nationwide recognition for the sport.
But still all of this felt a million miles away from what was going on in my life in America at that time, where I was playing professionally with the best players in the world live on television during most weeks of the season. There were decent crowds every week too, and we were all on decent money.
It was only when I hit rock bottom in my personal life and I came back to live in England that I could acknowledge and appreciate the changes that had gradually taken place at home. The ironic thing is, by then I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to play football any more.
It was seven years since I had last put on my beloved Arsenal colours, for instance. What had happened to me in those years was a real rollercoaster ride. I had some great highs, of course, but my God I’d had some rotten lows. I wouldn’t want to go through it all again, that’s for sure. When I search my memories of those years I struggle to separate the good from the bad.
I was in such a bad way towards the end that playing football was often the furthest thing from my mind. In fact for a while I was pretty sure I didn’t want to play football. I just thought that mentally I couldn’t do it. It seemed too much for me to face.
That trip up to Loughborough in the summer of 2004 was a massive wake-up call, but returning to play the game effectively and passionately was still at the end of a very long road for me. I needed to recover properly, physically and mentally, before I could even entertain such a thought, and I didn’t know how I could get to that point. All I knew was that I had to start out on that road, and that if I was ever again going to become the footballer I knew I could be, I must not look back.
It was approaching Christmas 2004 when Arsenal Ladies coach Vic Akers heard that I was back in the country and he started to call me regularly, just to chat at first. His offer to return to the club I loved still stood after all those years, but it was still a fair while before it could become a reality. He knew that and he never pushed me too hard, which was very important to me.
Vic was brilliant. All he would do was gently nudge me along, saying things like, ‘Why don’t you come down and train with us, Kelly?’ I didn’t make it easy for him but he kept on: ‘Come down and train with us and just see how you feel.’ He was pretty persistent but kind and gentle with it.
Eventually I succumbed, and a couple of times I went training with Arsenal Ladies. I quickly found that it was great therapy for me, and after only a month or so I got back into the swing of things. I agreed to re-sign for Arsenal early in 2005. That was quite a turnaround for me, because as I said, I wasn’t even certain that I wanted to play football any more.
Another thing that helped my focus and recovery was the fact that a job had come up at Arsenal at that time – assistant academy director. It was based up at Oaklands College, not too far away from my Hertfordshire home, where the club’s girls’ academy was created. The job was to look after about thirty girls aged between sixteen and nineteen. Once I’d begun to fall in love with the game again and enjoy being involved with the team and the girls, it seemed the perfect place for me to be. Like the position at Seton Hall after my degree was completed, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Everything just seemed to be slotting together perfectly.
Vic was great about it all. I had a secure job offer on the table and he promised me that I could take my time returning to the pitch, which was exactly the approach I needed him to take. It was important for me that he did that.
The timing of the job offer couldn’t have been better for me. I was very fortunate. I was keen to put pen to paper and secure the whole package. Before long I would be back to doing what I had done at college – playing and coaching in equal measure. This is what I had studied to do. This is what I wanted to do again. Right here, right now.
Faye White had already had a job at Arsenal for a number of years. She worked in the office at the men’s training ground. A number of other players work for the club today, including Jayne Ludlow, who’s a physiotherapist, and Emma Byrne, who works in an administrative role. The club really look after us and always have done. They could not have done any more for me, that’s for sure. I think that after everything that had happened in my life, a return to playing football again could only have happened through Vic and Arsenal.
The first thing I did after re-signing for the Gunners was to ask Vic if the number 8 shirt was available because I desperately wanted to wear it. He told me it was, so it was happy days. I had wanted to wear that Arsenal shirt ever since I first saw Ian Wright play at Highbury when I was a young girl. It was yet another dream come true for me – and it came along just after I had been thinking that my days in football might be over for good! But now that I was back playing again, and for the club that I loved, I had to make sure that I got my priorities right. Having the number 8 on my back was just the icing on the cake.