FOOTBALL
In 1971, six teams played at the women’s World Cup in Mexico, but it was struck from history. England captain Carol Wilson tells her story to Simon Barnes
It was the late 1950s. A little girl went to the park for a snowball fight with her dad. The backdrop was the imposi n g corrugated iron wall of Newcastle United Football Club – and then the whole park roared.
“It was like a plane going over too low,” she remembers now.
“My dad was punching the air – he said they must have scored a goal. And I said, ‘I’m going to do that!’ ”
And she did. In 1971 Carol Wilson captained the England football team before a crowd of 97,000 people in the Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. They were at the World Cup and part of a six-team competition that changed the world’s notion not only of women’s football, but of sport.
However, when Wilson and her team-mates came home, they were punished. All the players faced six-month bans; women’s matches were prohibited from all stadiums affiliated to the Football Association; England coach Harry Batt was barred for life; and the international body Fifa handed out its own bans, too.
Then, as now, Fifa wasn’t interested in promoting football, only in promoting Fifa. That’s why the 1971 women’s World Cup can’t be found in the off icial history of the game. The tournament came about because Mexican telecoms giant Televisa saw commercial potential in being host broadcasters for a women’s football tournament in the wake of the men’s World Cup in 1970 and the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City. When Fifa refused to ratify it, the organisers went ahead anyway – helped by the fact that Televisa happened to own two of Mexico’s largest arenas.
For years, the off icial story has been that Fifa has always supported the women’s game and the first women’s World Cup was held in 1991 in China. But the inaugural women’s World Cup was in fact held in Italy in 1970, and it was won by Denmark. The next year, Denmark again took the honours, beating Mexico 3–0 in the f inal at the Estadio Azteca in front of 110,000 people, still the largest crowd for a women’s sporting event in history.
Against all the odds, footage from the Mexico tournament has been found and restored, the leading players have been traced, and it’s been put together in Copa 71, an excellent documentary that has been executive produced by, among others, tennis star sisters Venus and Serena Williams.
Of course, Carol Wilson is a key voice. When she was just 18 months old in Newcastle, it was her daily job to fetch the newspaper when it was delivered – and she always took her football. “It came up to my waist,” she says. “I would never pick it up, shuffling it along the corridor, kicking it too hard.”
When she got b
