Ladies’ win is huge after long losing run

Gavin Caney talks ladies’ football, drifting and the Premier League title race in his weekly column in Your Local Paper.To say King’s Lynn Town Ladies’ wait for a win was a long one would be an understatement.It isn’t just the 11 matches it’s taken this season to chalk up a success that matters.It’s the campaign before that came and passed without a win – and the end of the previous term – that turned this winless delay into a seismic one.For the first time in 40 competitive matches, Lynn’s female players could finally walk off a pitch having beaten the other side on Sunday.A 2-1 triumph at Stevenage Development in the Eastern Region Women’s Football League Division One North only tells half of the story.It’s a tale of mass player departures, managerial comings and goings, the parting of ways with popular assistants, defeats and goals conceded – and plenty of them too. Last season alone, the beleaguered Linnets shipped 159 league goals on their way to relegation from the Premier Division. This season, 67 more went in during the first 10 games in all competitions.Yet manager April Kitchen finally got the triumph her, and former boss-turned-temporary-assistant Alec Marshall, deserved for sticking with the club through the most rotten of times as the gloom lifted in Hertfordshire thanks to goals from Gabrielle Cobb and Poppy Clapson.It’s only the second time in 2024/25 Lynn have scored more than one goal in a game. Plenty of sides would have folded had they been on such a torrid run. Managers would have walked away.Marshall never did, and neither did Kitchen even though her tenure got off to a slow start. Those players who stuck around, including the new recruits who contributed to a longer-term vision, deserve applause, too.Week in, week out, taking hit after hit but growing and believing. It must have been a special, if not slightly surreal, feeling on the way home having secured a result that took Lynn Ladies off the bottom of the table – a position they have been stuck in for more than 18 months.Only time will tell if it’s enough to prevent back-to-back relegations, but breaking the hoodoo was the first, and huge, challenge to overcome. Safety is only now four points away.In the darkest of times, there must have been no shining light for Lynn’s women.But they’ve found it and held their nerve at the weekend to do so when a rare lead disappeared. The hope is that their belief remains ahead of back-to-back cup fixtures for a while. There’s still a long way to go to get the side back to the level it was, let alone should be, but the first steps have been taken.There’s a joke doing the rounds that I’ve never knowingly missed a free event.But as a single dad with two young boys, I have to take advantage of every opportunity to entertain them without paying for it.So on Saturday when the Adrian Flux Arena was opened up for drifting enthusiasts to rip around the track, I was there with bells on to watch. Accompanied by my mum and dad – what else could a man want on his 65th birthday – before his celebratory meal, we all thoroughly enjoyed watching, mainly, BMWs screech around the centre green I used to work from.An array of colourful vehicles, some with flashing lights, excited my children while we all soaked in the sights, sounds and smells of cars getting sideways.Those hobbyists with the most capable skills definitely stood out but the rapid turnaround of vehicles on the track certainly helped maintain interest.If you like cars and motorsport, it’s certainly worth the cost of some fizzy drinks and chocolate bars from the stadium cafe to attend. It’s November.It’s worth remembering that as an avalanche of two-horse Premier League title content gets fed into your eyeballs. Even before Christmas, teams are being written off.Such is the short-term sensational nature of football and journalism these days, the oft-used turn of the year is no longer considered the point we start to draw real assessment from.After 11 games have been played, Arsenal and Chelsea have been ruled out of the battle to win the English game’s top prize. Given there are still 84 points to be played for, it’s ludicrously early to be disregarding a club’s chances just because they are nine points adrift of the early pacesetters. Man City’s uncharacteristically early-season wobble, albeit a fairly hefty one by their standards, has had some suggesting Liverpool are already cruising to the promised land again.Yet it would be unheard of if they didn’t at least have a blip of sorts, at some point – especially after their ‘new manager’ bounce surely wears off.This may well be the season that City’s dominance is broken. Nothing lasts forever. And there’s a chance that the current top two will remain.However, it would take a brave, or foolish, person to be writing anyone off at this stage, let alone City who always come again.There’s just too much football to be played yet.