One pleasing piece of refereeing news last week was that Rebecca Welch, was to take the middle of League Two match, Harrogate v Port Vale, over the Easter weekend.
This meant she became the first woman referee to be appointed to referee a Football League match. Another stalwart of women refereeing, Amy Fern, took over the whistle in 2010 when the referee of the Coventry v Nottingham Forest came off injured, but this was the first actual appointment.
I’m sure it didn’t faze Rebecca, having already refereed eight National League games this season. This is not Rebecca’s only first this season, for earlier she was the first English woman to become an Elite FIFA referee.
When I learned this, I suggested to the National Referees Association that they invite her to be guest speaker at one of their regular Zoom meetings.
I was delighted when she accepted their invitation and it was a pleasure to hear her explain, in her broad Geordie accent, her love of the game, coming from a football ‘mad’ family. Her father, an ardent Sunderland supporter, now travels to give her support at her games.
I was once invited, along with Sir John Madejski, to the opening of a new pavilion at a local football club.
As we inspected the referees changing room, he confided in me that when they built the stadium that bears his name, they were forced to include two referees’ changing rooms, one for women officials.
Cost us an extra £2000 he said, and we’ve only had one woman use it. That of course was Wendy Toms, another barrier breaker, being the first woman assistant referee on both the Football League and the Premier League.
There have been others since then, including Sian Massey-Ellis, who has been an assistant referee on the Premier League for over 10 years, and a brilliant one too.
Woman referees in other countries have been making such breakthroughs for many years. English woman referee have been slow off the mark, with the FA banning women from refereeing for most of the last century. Rebecca has shown that these opportunities now exist for English women referees.
By Dick Sawdon Smith
