Hope Powell will be best remembered as the England women’s team Head Coach, a position she held from 1998 to 2013. Her total of 162 games in charge is the highest number ever for the national team (male or female) and is a record unlikely to be surpassed.

Before stepping into international management, however, Powell had been one of the country’s finest attacking midfielders, making the first of her 72 England appearances in 1983 at the tender age of 16. 

Ahead of the FA Women’s National League’s formation she had already played in two FA Cup finals, ending up on the losing side (despite scoring two goals) with Friends of Fulham in 1989 but then two years later - and just four months before the FA WNL kicked off - collecting a winner’s medal with Millwall Lionesses. 

The Lionesses, where Powell had started her playing career as an 11-year-old and rejoined after two seasons with Friends of Fulham, were set to become founder members of the FA WNL. But they did so without Powell, who along with captain Sue Law and coach Alan May had left the club to help form a new team, Bromley Borough.

Recalling the sequence of events that led to the split, Powell says: “Sue and me weren’t the only players who’d left, several others did too and the atmosphere around the club wasn’t good.

“There was a lack of interest and a lack of investment by the club. We had a meeting with the people in charge and there didn’t seem any interest or desire, so that’s why we pulled away and decided to form our own team.”

While a new-look Millwall were beginning life in the FA WNL’s Premier Division, Bromley Borough - despite having quickly recruited a number of top players including internationals - had to work their way through two divisions of the South East Counties League in order to join the Southern Division of the FA WNL. Once there though, they sailed through to the top flight in a 1993-94 season which they totally dominated.

Powell says: “With the squad we had it was ridiculous that we had to start off in lower leagues, but the FA wouldn’t bend on that and so we had two seasons of battering most of the teams we played.

“We had some very good footballers, international players, and (once in the Southern Division) it was just a matter of going out to win the division to progress ourselves as a team.

“I don’t think there was any doubt that we would win it. Some of the scorelines were quite high and showed that it wasn’t overly taxing for us - we won it quite convincingly.”

After three successive promotions Bromley were on the charge, a charge that continued into the National Division - though this time with a name change to Croydon after Powell’s team was merged into Croydon FC, whose men’s semi-professional side played at the time in the Isthmian League.

“I believe Croydon wanted us to affiliate with them,” she says, “and it seemed like a really good opportunity to grow the club. There was a running track round the pitch, but there was a stand and so it was a stadium. It was all part of the bigger picture, it helped us to attract more good players and we also had a pathway with a B team.”

With England International Debbie Bampton as player-manager and Powell as captain, Croydon finished their first top flight campaign in a respectable fourth place. 

The following season was to see them complete a brilliant League and FA Cup double, though it started inauspiciously. After six Croydon players - including Bampton and Powell - had recently returned from playing in England’s first ever World Cup finals, their club’s first home match (a 6-4 win against Everton) was watched by a tiny attendance of just 27, noted the magazine ‘Sunday Kicks.’

Not that Powell and Co were complaining. “That’s just how it was,” she said, “it was of it’s time. The people who came to watch us were mainly family and friends, it was a social thing. If we got 200 people watching us that would be a really good attendance. So there was no real atmosphere off the pitch, but there certainly was on it.

“We were amateurs so we were playing for the love of the game, but we were very good players and passionate about our football - and the competitiveness was strong in the league.”

The increasing competitiveness of the FA WPL was illustrated by Croydon’s clinching of their 1995-96 double: the National Division was won on goal difference ahead of Doncaster Belles, and the FA Cup final needed a penalty shoot-out to beat Liverpool after a 1-1 draw - Powell scoring her team’s goal.

The Cup success was the first half of the double, followed by a gruelling schedule of five matches in 10 days to complete the top flight season. Powell recalls: “The FA weren’t very conscious of the loading it meant for us, not just in terms of playing the matches but having to fit them in around our jobs. We thought it was unfair. We wrote to them, but we just had to get on with it.”

Beating Doncaster in the third of of those five games was crucial, then finally a Tuesday evening clash with London rivals Arsenal was won to give Croydon their first League title - with Powell watching the closing stages from the sidelines after being injured in a challenge with Gunners defender Kelley Few.

She remembers: “Kelley came in for a tackle and I went up in the air, came down and landed on my shoulder. My clavicle popped out - and by the way it’s still out to this day. I was in real pain. They wanted to take me to the hospital but I said ‘no, I need to watch the game.’ 

“And then I remember Brenda (Sempare) getting the ball and dribbling from back to front and scoring the winner. And then we lifted the trophy. Then I went to hospital and had morphine. Which was wonderful….”

The seriously damaged shoulder was just the latest in a series of injuries suffered by Powell, the worst of them a snapped Achilles which put her out of action for 12 months in her early days at Friends of Fulham after she had joined from Millwall in 1987.

“It happened in a training session on concrete,” she remembers. “The facilities clubs had in those days for treating injuries and rehab were nothing compared with what came later as the (women’s) game went professional. If the provision for treatment and rehab had been there back then I might have been back in action after six months, but everything had to be done through the NHS and it took twice as long.” 

The shoulder injury sustained in Croydon’s 1995-96 title clinching match was not as serious and Powell was to play in two further seasons for her club team, culminating in the disappointment of a 3-2 FA Cup final loss to Arsenal after her equaliser to make it 2-2 had looked set to take the match into extra time.

But Kelley Few, two years after her crunching tackle had led to Powell’s shoulder injury, inflicted another painful blow as she poked home her team’s FA Cup winning goal three minutes into stoppage time.

Two league games later Croydon’s season was over with a fourth place finish, while Powell’s playing career was over with the job of England Head Coach waiting for her at FA headquarters.

Barely two months after her final England appearance as a player she was set to manage her first game as the national team boss in July 1998, thus managing players with whom she had so recently been a team mate.

A daunting task? “Not really,” she says. “A number of players who’d been friends of mine weren’t playing for England any longer so that wasn’t an issue. I obviously knew all the team’s current players because I’d played with them for England and with or against them in the Premier League, and that was a benefit.

“The talent pool wasn’t as big as it became later with the introduction of the Women’s Super League, but there was some great talent in the Premier League and it really shone through.”

As well as playing the leading role in growing the England team from a second rate power to one of the world’s leading women’s national sides, Powell was to be a major driving force in the move towards the professionalisation of the women’s game through the WSL.

Awarded an OBE in 2002 and a CBE eight years later, she later managed Brighton & Hove Albion in the the WSL and then worked as Birmingham City WFC’s Technical Director as she expanded a strong and lasting legacy as one of the most influential people in the growth of women’s football in England.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: Images from Gavin Ellis/TGSPHOTO and  The FA / Action Images / Andrew Boyers.