Lisa had the loveliest hair: long, straight and strikingly
red. She had to do nothing except wash it, unlike the rest
of us whose colour came out of a bottle and, despite spending
pounds at the hairdressers, our hair never looked as good
as hers. She looked stunning with her hair down, but we
usually saw her with her hair tied back in a ponytail when
she played for our team.
Men whistled at her from neighbouring pitches but she ignored
them, too involved in her own game to be distracted. We
all got whistles and the same comments wherever we played.
Men couldn't believe that women would be playing football;
wearing shorts that were shorter than any skirt had an effect
on them like Pavlov's dogs hearing that bell.
'Want to play in our team, darlin'?'
'Shouldn't you be playing netball?'
'One of our team has got a groin strain – can you
massage it for him?'
The usual stuff. They wouldn't take women's football seriously,
but we did. We trained two nights a week, with no alcohol
on Saturday night before playing on Sunday morning. It had
paid off: we were second in our league and had reached the
semi-finals of the Ladies' Cup.
Lisa may have looked like a model off the pitch but she
never stopped running when she was on it. She would shout
at us and keep us all going, marshalling the team from midfield
and tackling any opponent within yards of her. But she wasn't
there for the semi-finals because she had to go into hospital
for tests. She had missed the previous game, too, saying
she had the flu – the first game she had missed in
three years. We scraped through the semi-finals without
her, although it was close. We only realised how much we
relied on her when she wasn't there. Then, at Tuesday night
training, Karen told us that Lisa had something serious.
It wasn't leukaemia but it was something like it –
a blood disease with a long name that she couldn't remember.
We thought she must have got it wrong, but Lisa's sister
had told Karen that afternoon. We lost interest in training
that night and organised a rota for some of us to call in
at the hospital to see Lisa every night, training or not.
She lost weight and, with the treatment, she had also lost
her hair. She told us that she would need to wear a wig
until her own hair grew back. Not only did she look very
different, she had also lost her usual self-confidence;
the make-up she wore didn't hide how frightened she looked.
She was finishing off her course of treatment and wasn't
due home until after the Ladies' Cup final. She wouldn't
even be there to watch us, but wished us the best of luck
in the final and then broke down in tears. We tried to reassure
her that she would be back playing for us again, and that
there would be other Cup Finals, but I don't think that
we convinced her.
We had never seen Lisa like this before. She was usually
so confident when she was playing, although she was one
of the quieter team members off the field. We thought she
had everything – the looks, the self-assurance, even
a fella that looked like that actor in Emmerdale. Then Cheryl
told us that Lisa had just finished with her fella; within
a few weeks she had lost nearly everything. Karen tried
to joke about it at training.
'My Kenny has got more hair than Lisa for the first time
since I've known him,' she told us. 'He uses that "Wash
and Go." He just washed it and it went.'
We had seen how despondent Lisa had looked and discussed
what we could do to encourage her recovery. First we got
Julie to persuade her consultant that allowing her out,
just to watch our final, would boost her morale; she could
go back into hospital to finish her treatment after the
game. He agreed, although we thought that the short skirt,
the low-cut top and the fluttering eyelashes may have influenced
his decision. We had seen her work that trick before.
The rest was more difficult but everybody agreed to it,
even our fellas. We all booked into the hairdressers on
Saturday before the final, and we stayed in that night,
ready for our big day on Sunday. This one was for Lisa.
When we ran out from the changing rooms our fellas were
there cheering us on and so was Lisa, sitting in a fold-up
chair at the side of the pitch. Her sister stood behind
her, with the same red hair that Lisa once had, but Lisa
wore a headscarf to cover her baldness.
As we ran towards Lisa we had nothing to cover our bald
heads: we had all had them shaved so that she wouldn't feel
any different to the rest of us. She was laughing and crying,
laughing and crying as we lined up to hug her before we
went off to play.
We didn't win the game, and we didn't get a chance to show
off the Cup on Lisa's ward at the hospital, but Lisa was
back with us for the start of the next season. She told
us that seeing us all bald had given her the determination
to recover when she wasn't sure that she wanted to. She
may have lost nearly everything else but she knew that she
still had us. We all had cropped urchin cuts when the new
season started, and Lisa's hair still looked better than
ours.
