11th May, 2009
Recognition for Scottish Footballing Greats
Here we take a look at three of this countries footballing greats, who in the last year have finally be given the recognition that their remarkable achievements deserve.
[more]
Rose Reilly - First Woman Inductee to Scottish FA Hall of Fame
Perhaps the most gifted Scottish female player ever. Aged seven, Reilly caught the attention of a Celtic scout who admitted he was "interested in the wee No7 guy" only to be told it was a girl.
A trailblazer for women’s football, Reilly started her sporting career in Scotland – at 16 she was chosen to represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games pentathlon. However she decided to move on from the athletics track and concentrate on her skills on the football field, moving to mainland Europe to further her career. Her subsequent list of achievements is incredible considering the obstacles faced by female footballers in the early ‘70s. At 17 Reilly had a trial for Rheims in France and by the age of 18 she was playing for AC Milan. She was voted best player in the victorious Italian World Cup team that played China in the final in 1983.
- Won eight Serie A league titles
- Won four Italian Cups
- Scored 45 goals in one season
- Women’s World Cup Winner 1983
- Capped 13 times for Italy as captain
- Won the Golden Boot in 1983
SFA chief executive Gordon Smith pays tribute to her career and stresses her importance for the promotion of women's football.
"Rose Reilly is the first woman to be inducted and I think that's marvellous because we are trying to promote women's football in Scotland," he said. "We are trying to bring it up to the level of some of the other nations. We are getting more participation from girls at school level and youth level and the women's team is improving all the time.
"Rose Reilly was one of the great ambassadors of our game at one time. Even before the top male players were going to play abroad, she was in Italy as a professional player and achieved great things."
Pauline Hamill
In 2007, Hamill became the most-capped Scottish player of all time, beating the record previously held by Kenny Daglish.
Princess Pauline: the new King Kenny
Source: The Herald October 27 2007
Pauline Hamill has been in her element these last few days, eating, breathing and sleeping football, and indulging in thoughts of her past, present and future.
This afternoon, when she lines up for Scotland, who tackle Slovakia in a European Championship qualifier match in Vienna, Bratislava, the 35 year-old forward will create a little piece of history by gaining her 103rd cap, thus overtaking Kenny Dalglish's tally of appearances in the blue jersey.
As she admits, it has been an arduous ascent from the foothills of Coltness Ladies in Wishaw to the summit of achievement of becoming her country's record-breaking internationalist, but Hamill is feisty company, unashamedly proud of the efforts which she has channelled into the sport, both on and off the pitch. If the likes of Mike Newell, the self-proclaimed male chauvinist, choose to denigrate the soccer sorority, then that's their problem.
In her day job, Hamill works as the girls' football development officer at Falkirk's Westfield Stadium and it is a measure of the surge in popularity in women's football that, when she arrived in the post three years ago, there was virtually nobody playing the game.
"Now we have about 250 girls turning out every week," she said. "We have also created an academy structure for the most talented youngsters, where they learn about strength and conditioning, diet and nutrition all the things the boys are taught, and our goal is basically focused on telling any girl who wants to pursue a career in football: Here is your pathway from school age on to the senior circuit'.
"Hamill's own development from promising primary pupil to the Scotland ranks was the consequence of her own determination, tackling the boys in the badlands of Lanarkshire, dressed in her replica Scotland strip.
"Back then, there was no kind of representative ladder for people like me. If we impressed for our clubs Hamill, once of Doncaster Belles, is now on Hibs' books, the word would eventually get around that we were worth a call-up to the international squad, which is how I gained my first cap in 1992 a 1-0 defeat against England, but it was a huge learning curve. I never imagined when I was starting out that I would be on the verge of passing the national cap record
"Nowadays, there are under-15, under-17 and under-19 Scotland teams, the SWFA holds regular training camps and we have established close links with the SFA. The whole structure reflects the increasing professionalism which means that we should be starting to qualify for major tournaments. I have always been pretty hard-headed and I hate losing."
The next week will be pivotal to Scotland's European Championship prospects. Thus far, they have just one point from two matches, having drawn with Portugal and lost away to Ukraine - "a hard one to take, given the chances we created," says Hamill - but, if they can manage a victory over the Slovaks and repeat that against the Danes at McDiarmid Park on Wednesday evening, they will have enhanced their aspirations significantly.
The days have long gone - if they ever existed in Hamill's sphere - when respectability was deemed sufficient and certainly, casting one's eye down the team sheet, which includes such stalwart characters as Julie Fleeting, who will attain her century of caps in Perth, it is obvious that Anna Signeul's outfit boast the experience, ambition, and collective will to tap into the current feelgood factor permeating Scottish football.
"The guys have done a terrific job in 2007 and it would be tremendous to follow their exploits with a couple of wins in the next five days," says Hamill, who boldly informed her father that she would play for her country when she was seven and who believes that all her subsequent achievements are as much due to her parents' supportiveness as her own enthusiasm.
"I never imagined when I was starting out that I would be on the verge of passing the national cap record set by such a great player as Kenny Dalglish, but the sport has undergone a massive transformation in the past decade. We have to realise that the rest of the world is improving as well, so this is a very exciting time, but it is also one where we have to turn potential into victories and points."
Hamill may be approaching 36, but there is no sign of her relinquishing her competitive fire. On the contrary, working with the girls at Falkirk is keeping her young and dreaming of glorious feats in store. When she began her Scotland shift, it would have been unthinkable that Hampden would stage an exhibition about women's football, or that the chief executive of the SFA Gordon Smith would be making a presentation to Fleeting next week. Yet barriers are being dismantled and prejudices exorcised.
"You have to change people's perceptions and you will always get a few negative comments, but I think that most of the men have grown to appreciate that we love football and all we are asking is for the opportunity to drive the sport forward," says Hamill. She views the momentous occasion in 1998, when Scotland required a 17-0 success - and did the needful - against Lithuania to move up from Class B status and into the globe's elite, as a watershed occasion.
"We have made a lot of progress since then, and we are starting to reap the rewards of years of missionary work. When I look into the eyes of some of the youngsters at Westfield, I recognise the expression - once, that was me, and I will still be really excited when I am singing the anthem on Saturday."
She has neither accumulated lavish wealth from her footballing forays, nor enjoyed any of the accoutrements of celebrity which have routinely been handed to Dalglish. But her Scotland caps are like precious stones to Hamill.
Call them the Pearls of Pauline.
Julie Fleeting
Played for Ayr United, then professionally for San Diego Spirit in California (the first Scot to play in America's professional women's league), then Ross County Ladies, and now Arsenal Ladies, (where she has recently won the European Cup), combined with a century of caps for Scotland, of whom she is captain.
100 goals, 100 games - Fleeting's phenomenal
Source: Scotsman, October 2007
Managing to collect your 100th international goal before reaching your 100th cap is an achievement which sets you out from the crowd, but then Julie Fleeting has always been different from the moment she started out playing for her local boys' team in Ayrshire. She claimed this cherished strike on Saturday against Slovakia but does not have long to wait for her cap total to catch up.
Against Denmark at McDiarmid Park tomorrow night, in another European Championship qualifier, she makes her 100th international appearance, and still her remarkable career is far from over.
Fleeting, who turned 27 earlier this month, has no imminent plans to retire although she is considering bowing to her maternal instincts at some point. Newly married, she is asked the question constantly and Fleeting recognises that a family is something she desires.
Future bed-time stories will have to include a few golden weeks in 2007, when Fleeting picked up her 100th goal, her 100th cap and a special award to commemorate the twin achievement from Gordon Smith, chief executive of the Scottish Football Association.
This is scheduled to happen prior to the men's vital European Championship qualifier with Italy later this month, in front of a wild, expectant gathering. It is a setting this true heroine of Scottish football deserves, although, typically for someone so modest, she yesterday fretted about being able to snaffle up a ticket for the big match.
Before then she has her own vital qualifying match to deal with, against Denmark tomorrow. Her milestone goal on Saturday helped Scotland to a 3-0 win over Slovakia, a victory which keeps the side in the hunt for the finals in Finland in 2009.
Fleeting noted that her strike was set-up by Kim Little, a 17-year-old who seems likely to inherit her status as the leading Scottish player.
But whether she scales the same heights as Fleeting on a global scale remains to be seen, with the Ayrshire PE teacher having been voted most valuable player in America during her time with San Diego Spirit. Fleeting also won the European Cup with Arsenal Ladies, her current club, last season.
Her latest triumph has come with a measure of relief. Not one for lingering on personal exploits she left it to her brother, Barry, to keep her informed of her statistical progress in a Scotland shirt.
"I was very aware I was sitting on 99," she said. "I missed a sitter just before I scored and was going about like a bear with a sore head. I was very crabbit, as my team-mates will tell you. It's the first time I have ever been aware of needing to score that badly.
"My brother had been winding me up about it," she continued. "He was saying that my ratio of goals to caps was slowing up a bit. Until I got into the late 90s I hadn't really thought about it.
"Over the last few years I have had more goals than caps. But as I got nearer to the 100 mark it started to even out. I was under pressure from Barry to get the 100th goal before my 100th cap. I managed to do it - just."
Given the surprising fact she did not get off the mark until her fifth cap, this feat is made more admirable. Since then, the goals have come thick and fast, including four in a 17-0 win over Lithuania when her father Jim, director of football development at the SFA, was in charge of the team. Not surprisingly she rates this as her most memorable match.
"It was the last game in the group, and we were tied on points at the top," she recalled. "Czech Republic had a plus 16 goal advantage, so we had to win 17-0. It was 16-0 after 80 minutes, and then their goalkeeper started making world-class saves. I managed to score in the 93rd minute, and that was the goal which put us through."
The possibility that Scotland might be beaten by such a margin seemed more likely when Fleeting made her debut in 1996. The financial input was almost non-existent in those days, as, too, was the support of the SFA.
Now the governing body has taken the team under its wing, and the team has gone from strength to strength under the guidance of Anna Signeul.
"My first international was against Wales at Somerset Park," Fleeting recalled. "We got beaten and I didn't score, so it wasn't a great start for me. This was when we had the Scottish Women's Football Association, not the SFA.
"We stayed in youth hostels and had a completely different strip to the men's team. They had to scrape together any pennies they could to send you places.
"If things hadn't changed there is no way I could have got to the stage where I have 100 caps. Financially we simply could not have played so many games. I am in a position to be able to compare what it was like then to how fortunate we are now."
Fleeting is still not the public property of Kenny Dalglish or Denis Law, those greats of the men's game she deserves to be ranked alongside as their equivalent as the leading scorer in a national team jersey.
"I can go to Tesco and not get chased down the street," she said. "Where I live most people know me because it's where I grew up, not because of football."
Special thanks to Cocoa Rose Photography for provision of images.
Perhaps the most gifted Scottish female player ever. Aged seven, Reilly caught the attention of a Celtic scout who admitted he was "interested in the wee No7 guy" only to be told it was a girl.
A trailblazer for women’s football, Reilly started her sporting career in Scotland – at 16 she was chosen to represent Scotland at the Commonwealth Games pentathlon. However she decided to move on from the athletics track and concentrate on her skills on the football field, moving to mainland Europe to further her career. Her subsequent list of achievements is incredible considering the obstacles faced by female footballers in the early ‘70s. At 17 Reilly had a trial for Rheims in France and by the age of 18 she was playing for AC Milan. She was voted best player in the victorious Italian World Cup team that played China in the final in 1983.
- Won eight Serie A league titles
- Won four Italian Cups
- Scored 45 goals in one season
- Women’s World Cup Winner 1983
- Capped 13 times for Italy as captain
- Won the Golden Boot in 1983
SFA chief executive Gordon Smith pays tribute to her career and stresses her importance for the promotion of women's football.
"Rose Reilly is the first woman to be inducted and I think that's marvellous because we are trying to promote women's football in Scotland," he said. "We are trying to bring it up to the level of some of the other nations. We are getting more participation from girls at school level and youth level and the women's team is improving all the time.
"Rose Reilly was one of the great ambassadors of our game at one time. Even before the top male players were going to play abroad, she was in Italy as a professional player and achieved great things."
Pauline Hamill
In 2007, Hamill became the most-capped Scottish player of all time, beating the record previously held by Kenny Daglish.
Princess Pauline: the new King Kenny
Source: The Herald October 27 2007
Pauline Hamill has been in her element these last few days, eating, breathing and sleeping football, and indulging in thoughts of her past, present and future.
This afternoon, when she lines up for Scotland, who tackle Slovakia in a European Championship qualifier match in Vienna, Bratislava, the 35 year-old forward will create a little piece of history by gaining her 103rd cap, thus overtaking Kenny Dalglish's tally of appearances in the blue jersey.
As she admits, it has been an arduous ascent from the foothills of Coltness Ladies in Wishaw to the summit of achievement of becoming her country's record-breaking internationalist, but Hamill is feisty company, unashamedly proud of the efforts which she has channelled into the sport, both on and off the pitch. If the likes of Mike Newell, the self-proclaimed male chauvinist, choose to denigrate the soccer sorority, then that's their problem.
In her day job, Hamill works as the girls' football development officer at Falkirk's Westfield Stadium and it is a measure of the surge in popularity in women's football that, when she arrived in the post three years ago, there was virtually nobody playing the game.
"Now we have about 250 girls turning out every week," she said. "We have also created an academy structure for the most talented youngsters, where they learn about strength and conditioning, diet and nutrition all the things the boys are taught, and our goal is basically focused on telling any girl who wants to pursue a career in football: Here is your pathway from school age on to the senior circuit'.
"Hamill's own development from promising primary pupil to the Scotland ranks was the consequence of her own determination, tackling the boys in the badlands of Lanarkshire, dressed in her replica Scotland strip.
"Back then, there was no kind of representative ladder for people like me. If we impressed for our clubs Hamill, once of Doncaster Belles, is now on Hibs' books, the word would eventually get around that we were worth a call-up to the international squad, which is how I gained my first cap in 1992 a 1-0 defeat against England, but it was a huge learning curve. I never imagined when I was starting out that I would be on the verge of passing the national cap record
"Nowadays, there are under-15, under-17 and under-19 Scotland teams, the SWFA holds regular training camps and we have established close links with the SFA. The whole structure reflects the increasing professionalism which means that we should be starting to qualify for major tournaments. I have always been pretty hard-headed and I hate losing."
The next week will be pivotal to Scotland's European Championship prospects. Thus far, they have just one point from two matches, having drawn with Portugal and lost away to Ukraine - "a hard one to take, given the chances we created," says Hamill - but, if they can manage a victory over the Slovaks and repeat that against the Danes at McDiarmid Park on Wednesday evening, they will have enhanced their aspirations significantly.
The days have long gone - if they ever existed in Hamill's sphere - when respectability was deemed sufficient and certainly, casting one's eye down the team sheet, which includes such stalwart characters as Julie Fleeting, who will attain her century of caps in Perth, it is obvious that Anna Signeul's outfit boast the experience, ambition, and collective will to tap into the current feelgood factor permeating Scottish football.
"The guys have done a terrific job in 2007 and it would be tremendous to follow their exploits with a couple of wins in the next five days," says Hamill, who boldly informed her father that she would play for her country when she was seven and who believes that all her subsequent achievements are as much due to her parents' supportiveness as her own enthusiasm.
"I never imagined when I was starting out that I would be on the verge of passing the national cap record set by such a great player as Kenny Dalglish, but the sport has undergone a massive transformation in the past decade. We have to realise that the rest of the world is improving as well, so this is a very exciting time, but it is also one where we have to turn potential into victories and points."
Hamill may be approaching 36, but there is no sign of her relinquishing her competitive fire. On the contrary, working with the girls at Falkirk is keeping her young and dreaming of glorious feats in store. When she began her Scotland shift, it would have been unthinkable that Hampden would stage an exhibition about women's football, or that the chief executive of the SFA Gordon Smith would be making a presentation to Fleeting next week. Yet barriers are being dismantled and prejudices exorcised.
"You have to change people's perceptions and you will always get a few negative comments, but I think that most of the men have grown to appreciate that we love football and all we are asking is for the opportunity to drive the sport forward," says Hamill. She views the momentous occasion in 1998, when Scotland required a 17-0 success - and did the needful - against Lithuania to move up from Class B status and into the globe's elite, as a watershed occasion.
"We have made a lot of progress since then, and we are starting to reap the rewards of years of missionary work. When I look into the eyes of some of the youngsters at Westfield, I recognise the expression - once, that was me, and I will still be really excited when I am singing the anthem on Saturday."
She has neither accumulated lavish wealth from her footballing forays, nor enjoyed any of the accoutrements of celebrity which have routinely been handed to Dalglish. But her Scotland caps are like precious stones to Hamill.
Call them the Pearls of Pauline.
Julie Fleeting
Played for Ayr United, then professionally for San Diego Spirit in California (the first Scot to play in America's professional women's league), then Ross County Ladies, and now Arsenal Ladies, (where she has recently won the European Cup), combined with a century of caps for Scotland, of whom she is captain.
100 goals, 100 games - Fleeting's phenomenal
Source: Scotsman, October 2007
Managing to collect your 100th international goal before reaching your 100th cap is an achievement which sets you out from the crowd, but then Julie Fleeting has always been different from the moment she started out playing for her local boys' team in Ayrshire. She claimed this cherished strike on Saturday against Slovakia but does not have long to wait for her cap total to catch up.
Against Denmark at McDiarmid Park tomorrow night, in another European Championship qualifier, she makes her 100th international appearance, and still her remarkable career is far from over.
Fleeting, who turned 27 earlier this month, has no imminent plans to retire although she is considering bowing to her maternal instincts at some point. Newly married, she is asked the question constantly and Fleeting recognises that a family is something she desires.
Future bed-time stories will have to include a few golden weeks in 2007, when Fleeting picked up her 100th goal, her 100th cap and a special award to commemorate the twin achievement from Gordon Smith, chief executive of the Scottish Football Association.
This is scheduled to happen prior to the men's vital European Championship qualifier with Italy later this month, in front of a wild, expectant gathering. It is a setting this true heroine of Scottish football deserves, although, typically for someone so modest, she yesterday fretted about being able to snaffle up a ticket for the big match.
Before then she has her own vital qualifying match to deal with, against Denmark tomorrow. Her milestone goal on Saturday helped Scotland to a 3-0 win over Slovakia, a victory which keeps the side in the hunt for the finals in Finland in 2009.
Fleeting noted that her strike was set-up by Kim Little, a 17-year-old who seems likely to inherit her status as the leading Scottish player.
But whether she scales the same heights as Fleeting on a global scale remains to be seen, with the Ayrshire PE teacher having been voted most valuable player in America during her time with San Diego Spirit. Fleeting also won the European Cup with Arsenal Ladies, her current club, last season.
Her latest triumph has come with a measure of relief. Not one for lingering on personal exploits she left it to her brother, Barry, to keep her informed of her statistical progress in a Scotland shirt.
"I was very aware I was sitting on 99," she said. "I missed a sitter just before I scored and was going about like a bear with a sore head. I was very crabbit, as my team-mates will tell you. It's the first time I have ever been aware of needing to score that badly.
"My brother had been winding me up about it," she continued. "He was saying that my ratio of goals to caps was slowing up a bit. Until I got into the late 90s I hadn't really thought about it.
"Over the last few years I have had more goals than caps. But as I got nearer to the 100 mark it started to even out. I was under pressure from Barry to get the 100th goal before my 100th cap. I managed to do it - just."
Given the surprising fact she did not get off the mark until her fifth cap, this feat is made more admirable. Since then, the goals have come thick and fast, including four in a 17-0 win over Lithuania when her father Jim, director of football development at the SFA, was in charge of the team. Not surprisingly she rates this as her most memorable match.
"It was the last game in the group, and we were tied on points at the top," she recalled. "Czech Republic had a plus 16 goal advantage, so we had to win 17-0. It was 16-0 after 80 minutes, and then their goalkeeper started making world-class saves. I managed to score in the 93rd minute, and that was the goal which put us through."
The possibility that Scotland might be beaten by such a margin seemed more likely when Fleeting made her debut in 1996. The financial input was almost non-existent in those days, as, too, was the support of the SFA.
Now the governing body has taken the team under its wing, and the team has gone from strength to strength under the guidance of Anna Signeul.
"My first international was against Wales at Somerset Park," Fleeting recalled. "We got beaten and I didn't score, so it wasn't a great start for me. This was when we had the Scottish Women's Football Association, not the SFA.
"We stayed in youth hostels and had a completely different strip to the men's team. They had to scrape together any pennies they could to send you places.
"If things hadn't changed there is no way I could have got to the stage where I have 100 caps. Financially we simply could not have played so many games. I am in a position to be able to compare what it was like then to how fortunate we are now."
Fleeting is still not the public property of Kenny Dalglish or Denis Law, those greats of the men's game she deserves to be ranked alongside as their equivalent as the leading scorer in a national team jersey.
"I can go to Tesco and not get chased down the street," she said. "Where I live most people know me because it's where I grew up, not because of football."
Special thanks to Cocoa Rose Photography for provision of images.
