WITH a young family, a day job at Scottish Rowing and a sports consultancy business all to be juggled, the question is what motivated Stevie Baxter to take on another commitment to become head coach at Forfar Farmington.
The team train three nights a week and have to travel further than the other SWPL1 clubs every other Sunday.
“I’ve had an association with Farmington for over 15 years,” said Baxter, who replaced Mark Nisbet as head coach during the close season. “I was the development officer for the SFA in Angus and I’ve seen the club move forward in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
“When the opportunity came up I thought it was a good way to get back into football in Scotland. Nathan Flight and Claire Garrett are excellent coaches and I can help them by passing on my experience.”
Baxter was back in Scotland having spent the best part of six years in New Zealand working for the Auckland Football Federation, and was also a coach with the national women’s Under-20 team. His daughter was born there, but the need for more family support had brought Baxterand his wife, Laura, back. She, incidentally, is at the Special Olympics World Games in Abu Dhabi as Team GB’s head of delegation.
Nisbet, along with Kev Candy and John Diplexcito, had guided Forfar to fifth place when they departed at the end of last season and Baxter, after a bad opener at the K Park where his side lost 4-0 to Celtic, hopes to build on that while switching to a more possession-based style of football. Wins over Motherwell and Kilmarnock were followed by a 2-1 reverse at Rangers last Sunday.
“The Celtic game was a week too early for us. We’d had a couple of pre-season games cancelled because of the weather,” the head coach said. “We were really unlucky not to come away with a result against Rangers. We had two or three first-team players who were out with injury.”
A big test awaits today as Station Park hosts Glasgow City. Two of the 12-time champions’ former players, Donna Paterson and Hannah Stewart, are now with the home side, although central defender Paterson is an injury doubt.
HAVING spoken to all the parties involved, there is little point in dwelling on the events which led to BBC Alba cancelling their live broadcast of the Celtic v Motherwell game on Friday night. The SBS SWPL1 match went ahead anyway and resulted in a 0-0 draw.
The difficulty was the positioning of the temporary gantry for the cameras, and if there is a lesson to be learned it is that venues chosen for live broadcasts could perhaps be inspected earlier. East Kilbride Community Trust own the K-Park, which is a hospitable venue, and they seem to have been taken aback that a solution couldn't be found.
There is a lot of goodwill involved in televising these matches, with the primary aim being to raise the profile of women footballers. That's what's most important, and despite the unfortunate circumstances of Friday the venue has not been ruled out for future live broadcasts.
THE jaw having dropped at earlier crowds for women's football in Spain this season, it hit the pavement with the news that all 68,000 tickets for today's Primera Division game between league leaders Atletico Madrid and second-placed Barcelona sold out during the week.
The game is being played at Atletico's relatively new Wanda Metropolitano stadium. The venue will stage the men's Champions League final on June 1, and hopefully that will also be a sell out.
Men's football is a growing sport and deserves it.
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