Jackie Scherschel is a proud Corinthian-Casuals supporter and a member of our women’s team committee, but she also represented her country in one of women’s football’s first international tournaments. This is the story of the footballing pioneer in our midst…
Words: Dominic Bliss
You won’t hear her shouting about it, but one member of the Corinthian-Casuals Women committee once represented her country in an international tournament.
Jackie Scherschel, who became a Corinthian-Casuals supporter when her daughter Sophie played in our girls’ section during the early 2000s, once played centre-half for the Northwood Ladies side who were invited to represent the United Kingdom at the World Women’s Invitational Tournament in October 1978. A marquee event in the mould of a World Cup – the tournament was hosted by Taiwan and was the first of its kind in women’s football, contested by 13 teams from four different continents.
While the other countries sent their full national sides, we were unofficially represented by Northwood – whose men’s team faced us in an Isthmian League fixture here recently– and it just so happened that Jackie had joined the club a few months earlier, almost by pure chance.
“The person who initially got me involved in playing was a guy called Paul Byrne, who was club secretary for Northwood,” she recalls. “I’d known him for years and one day I was over the park walking the dog when I saw him and he said, ‘We’re thinking about getting a ladies’ team together. Would you be interested?’
“I was 18, and initially I’d said no because I didn’t have much interest in football at the time, but then I thought it could actually be a good way to keep fit after leaving school and college. So I decided to play for this new team at Northwood, and we had only been going about seven months when this opportunity came up for us to go to Taiwan.”
Northwood Ladies – who may have been invited to represent the UK due to their manager Harry Benjamin’s connections from his day job as a travel agent – were used to playing in front of 20-odd people for domestic fixtures, so they got a bit of a surprise when their flight was greeted by a full press pack eager to snap photos of the arriving teams.
“We had no idea what a big deal it was over there,” says Jackie, who went by her maiden name Hore at the time. “We were famous for three weeks – it was crazy!”
Jackie got a further taste of things to come when she was asked to be the UK’s flag bearer at the opening ceremony.
“The first thing I knew about it was when I was picked up and taken to the stadium for a dress rehearsal for the flying of the flag,” she explains. “I got to the stadium and just thought, ‘This is enormous!’
“I remember going back to the hotel and just saying to the rest of the girls, ‘Oh. My. Goodness. This is huge!’
“And it was. We were on the TV every day, on the news. They just loved women’s football – wherever we went, we had police escorts…it was just huge.”
Words: Dominic Bliss
You won’t hear her shouting about it, but one member of the Corinthian-Casuals Women committee once represented her country in an international tournament.
Jackie Scherschel, who became a Corinthian-Casuals supporter when her daughter Sophie played in our girls’ section during the early 2000s, once played centre-half for the Northwood Ladies side who were invited to represent the United Kingdom at the World Women’s Invitational Tournament in October 1978. A marquee event in the mould of a World Cup – the tournament was hosted by Taiwan and was the first of its kind in women’s football, contested by 13 teams from four different continents.
While the other countries sent their full national sides, we were unofficially represented by Northwood – whose men’s team faced us in an Isthmian League fixture here recently– and it just so happened that Jackie had joined the club a few months earlier, almost by pure chance.
“The person who initially got me involved in playing was a guy called Paul Byrne, who was club secretary for Northwood,” she recalls. “I’d known him for years and one day I was over the park walking the dog when I saw him and he said, ‘We’re thinking about getting a ladies’ team together. Would you be interested?’
“I was 18, and initially I’d said no because I didn’t have much interest in football at the time, but then I thought it could actually be a good way to keep fit after leaving school and college. So I decided to play for this new team at Northwood, and we had only been going about seven months when this opportunity came up for us to go to Taiwan.”
Northwood Ladies – who may have been invited to represent the UK due to their manager Harry Benjamin’s connections from his day job as a travel agent – were used to playing in front of 20-odd people for domestic fixtures, so they got a bit of a surprise when their flight was greeted by a full press pack eager to snap photos of the arriving teams.
“We had no idea what a big deal it was over there,” says Jackie, who went by her maiden name Hore at the time. “We were famous for three weeks – it was crazy!”
Jackie got a further taste of things to come when she was asked to be the UK’s flag bearer at the opening ceremony.
“The first thing I knew about it was when I was picked up and taken to the stadium for a dress rehearsal for the flying of the flag,” she explains. “I got to the stadium and just thought, ‘This is enormous!’
“I remember going back to the hotel and just saying to the rest of the girls, ‘Oh. My. Goodness. This is huge!’
“And it was. We were on the TV every day, on the news. They just loved women’s football – wherever we went, we had police escorts…it was just huge.”
The team’s first game was against Thailand in the National Stadium of Taipei, and it attracted 17,000 people even though the pitch was covered in water due to the monsoon rain.
“The pitch was literally under water,” Jackie recalls, “and to try and soak up some of the rain they put down powdered lime! If you went down on the pitch, your skin got burned by the lime – I can certainly remember that!
“I was a centre-half, and I wasn’t by any means a skilful player, but I was fast. I was taught by our trainer Ray Bullen, ‘It doesn’t matter if you get the ball, just make sure you come into contact with something!’”
That first game against Thailand proved to be their only taste of the national stadium, as they moved out 150 miles into the country to play out the rest of their matches in a mountain retreat called Taichung.
Northwood – or the UK – finished tenth of the 13 nations in the pool stage, meaning they didn’t progress, but they did record three victories, over Austria, Canada and Polynesia.
“We were the underdogs and we really pushed ourselves, we really played well,” recalls Jackie. “I remember one of the managers coming to shake my hand after the game and saying, ‘You played really well.’”
Despite the buzz around events in Taiwan, the team discovered that their performances had made little impression on the media back in Britain, where only the local press covered the tournament.
“Back here it was really unimportant, it meant nothing,” recalls Jackie. “They weren’t really interested.”
Her time at Northwood came to an end soon after the tournament, as she was forced to give up football due to work commitments at the weekend. The whole journey from park football to international tournament had taken less than a year. Although her playing days were brief, she had been in the right place at the right time to take part in an historic international event.