ONE of the best signings of the football season so far seems to have been Spartans' of Edinburgh Ladies Football Club, at least if the league table is anything to go by. There they sit, in their new guise as 'Spartans Women's FC,' second in the league, three points behind Celtic but with a game in hand.
But that is not all. Having thumped Hibs 5-2 in the Premier League Cup semi-final, they play in Saturday's final, against Glasgow City.
"It couldn't be going any better," says Carson Ralton, coach to Edinburgh Ladies last year, who has stepped "si
deways" to allow Scottish international Shelley Kerr to become player-coach. Ralton describes the link-up with Spartans not as an amalgamation but "a marriage".
It was Ralton who made the approach to Spartans last year, heralding another change of identity for a team that, in previous incarnations, has been known as Hailes United, Edinburgh Tynecastle, Bonnyrigg Rose and Whitehill Welfare. Even at this early stage he feels that the new identity is permanent.
Clearly the cup final will be a huge occasion for the new Spartans Women's FC, but arguably an even more significant date is 5 December, when, after a short delay, the £3.3million Spartans Community Football Academy will open its doors. That will mean no more traipsing around Edinburgh to different venues for their three weekly training sessions, or indeed to play matches.
The new facility, close to Spartans' dilapidated old ground at Ainslie Park, off Ferry Road, will host all men's and women's training and games. You could say it will be the marital home.
Spartans men are also looking forward to taking the keys to their new premises, where they can drive forward their plans to establish themselves as the very model of a community club. Today, a new development officer, Kenny Cameron, takes up his post, and a second development officer will start in January. Offering a further demonstration of Spartans' commitment to women's football, the new appointee will be female.
Craig Graham, the club chairman, echoes Ralton in acknowledging the success of the "marriage" with – or should that be to? – the ladies. But there is a lot more to come, he says, with one big ambition to get more people through the gates. "The stand will seat 500 and we have a clubhouse – more a café bar – that can accommodate about 100. It'll be child friendly," he emphasises.
Graham lists the communities in Spartans' 'catchment' area, and says the club wants to engage with and involve all of them, with the club running teams from under-six upwards. They play four-a-side up to under-10s, then move up to seven-a-side; and the plan, eventually, is to have girls' sides, too.
It is telling that the new development officer job attracted 50 applications, four of them from ex-professional players – and even more telling that the successful candidate wasn't a former professional, but a youth worker in Muirhouse. To mark the opening of the new Spartans Community Football Academy a mini festival of football is planned either next Easter or summer, with Academy patron Gordon Strachan expected to bring a Celtic XI.
Winter gig for Cooke...TWO of Scotland's top athletes – a long jumper and a cyclist – could be making a dramatic switch – to bobsleighing.
The versatile Gillian Cooke – a triple jumper at the Commonwealth Youth Games in 2000, a pole vaulter at the 2002 Commonwealth Games, and long jumper in Melbourne in 2006 – could yet take on a fourth discipline, if her burgeoning bobsleigh career takes off.
Cooke's involvement came about through Facebook. The woman who is third on Scotland's all-time long jump list answered a call from Nicola Minichiello, Britain's top ranked driver, for a new brake woman.
Having gone to Bath University for trials – which she passed with flying colours – Cooke has now just returned from training in Lake Placid, and she left on Saturday for the World Cup series.
For somebody who had never so much as set foot in a bobsleigh until a couple of months ago, it is an incredible commitment.
The first World Cup is in Winterberg, Germany, at the end of the month; then the series moves on to Austria, Italy, Switzerland (on the legendary track of St Moritz), Canada and the USA, where the world championships are also held, at Lack Placid, from 16 February to 1 March.
Even more remarkably, Cooke intends, after all that, to return to athletics next summer.
In the meantime, her progress can be followed here:
www.teamminichiello.co.uk.
... and for MacLean COOKE could be joined – at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010? – by Craig MacLean, the track cyclist who this week leaves for Italy to film a BBC programme, The Ice Men Cometh, to be broadcast over Christmas.
MacLean, who rode what will probably turn out to be his last World Cup over the weekend, will find himself in the Italian mountains with athletes Dean Macey, Jason Gardener and rugby player Dan Luger, all of whom are to be transformed into bobsleighers in an intensive few days. For MacLean it will be a diversion from cycling, though he returns to the track for one last hurrah as an individual athlete at the Revolution meeting in Manchester next month.
MacLean's venture down the icy tracks not a serious one. But who knows where it could lead? When this question was put to MacLean yesterday, he seemed wary, saying: "That's what I'm worried about."
The full article contains 929 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
