The inner sanctum is a unique environment where personalities jostle and the coach tries to harness sometimes competing energies. Rhali Dobson pulls back the curtain.
If you wanted to make a movie about the drama of a dressing room in elite women’s football, High School Musical would be a pretty good model.
The inner sanctum, the lab where coaches try to build winning teams, can be volatile, emotional, acrimonious, lonely, supportive and exhilarating. It’s a place where egos clash, where harsh words can be said but where lifelong friendships get formed. And each season, you never know exactly what you’re going to get.
Throughout my career I played in dressing rooms with big personalities and international stars, but there is no template for what will be successful. They say that coaches create an environment but players create the culture, and I’ve been in losing dressing rooms that were joyful places to be, and winning versions that felt almost soulless.
There are distinct differences between a change room full of women and of men. The latter tends to be a collection of egos, banter and rivalries that are friendly – mostly. But women tend, as I suggested in the opening sentence, to drift into distinct groups, just as we did at school.
Each of those will have one of the popular characters or bigger personalities at its heart, and others will naturally gravitate around them, especially the flitterers who follow whichever teammate is flavour of the month.
For a young player it can be a daunting place to navigate – unless, like me at 16 going into the first season of the W-League, you have little idea of who these stars are because the profile of women’s football was so low.
Looking back now I can see the quiet leadership of Cheryl Salisbury made itself felt and dovetailed with the passion and positivity of Joey Peters.
We came second that year, but it was the 2013-14 Jets dressing room that I look back on most fondly in some ways. From the outside it was awful – we lost every game until Gema Simon scored with the last kick of the season to earn us a point in the final game.
And yet I have never played in a team where the dressing room was more supportive – no one was left behind, we fought for each other, and we partied like we’d won the World Cup when we got that point.
Part of that came from the honesty and straight talking of our coach, Peter McGuinness, one of the best I had – and a coach who, when I once asked him angrily why he’d substituted me, told me it was because I’d been “f****** crap”! You knew where you stood with Peter.
Likewise with Paddy Kisnorbo at Melbourne City. We played them in the last game of the 2016-17 season in Coffs Harbour and he spoke to me briefly after the game. A while later, out of the blue, he called me and said he wanted me at City within 48 hours.
I went without any thought because of his belief and honesty – vital traits in a coach for a dressing room to thrive. That first season at City we had a whole bunch of Matildas plus imported stars like Jodie Taylor and Jess Fishlock but it wasn’t the collection of egos I might have expected.
Part of that came from the high standards set by those players, and by Kisnorbo. For one game we were given wrong directions to where were supposed to meet, and arrived two minutes late – we all had a strip torn off us by the coach. It was the same if you didn’t do your job on the field – honesty, transparency is all you ask for, and we finished the season as champions.
The next year we lost several of our visa players and we lost Paddy to the City men’s team – but we still brought in big-game players like Jasmyne Spencer. Rado Vidosic had never coached a women’s team before and it was, to put it mildly, a difficult transition, for him and us – we didn’t make the finals.
The fascinating thing for me though was how the year after that unfolded. There were good signings and we went unbeaten right through to winning the grand final in the early days of COVID. But it wasn’t an overwhelmingly enjoyable experience for many players; the polar opposite of the 2013 season at Newcastle. Here there was little gelling off the pitch, little socialisation; we were doing a job.
It’s worth noting that some of those players came to my wedding last month – it just shows how a dressing room in any given season can be the opposite of what you expect, no matter who’s in it.
