the times | Saturday January 1 2022 1GS 9Football Sport
JOE GIDDENS/PAthings, about myself and Neil, that
spread through Leeds fans. I don’t
know how we got hold of these
Facebook messages but Edoardo,
one of the Cellino sons, was horrific
towards me, calling me some names
which were awful, and quite a few
Leeds fans believed it and they
just spread.
“It took me five years to get over.
I feel completely betrayed. I haven’t
been back for a game yet. I’ll be fine
when I do because I just get so much
support from Leeds fans.
“Proper Leeds fans know exactly
what Neil and I did. I’m biased, but
Neil is probably the best player
developer ever.
“I’ve seen him work. If he hadn’t
done what he did at Leeds then Leeds
would never have got [their head
coach, Marcelo] Bielsa, they would
have still been in League One. His
analysis is second to none.”
Ward eventually found work in
2017 with the Premier League — she
says she “will never forget” its support
— before her success on the BBC,
BT Sport, talkSPORT and Amazon
Prime claimed her full-time. She loves
covering the transformation in the
women’s game, on and off the pitch.
“If you asked me two years ago
whether I’d be commentating on
men’s football I’d have said,
‘Absolutely not a chance in hell.’ ”
But the call came from Amazon.
“When I first started doing men’s
games I was nervous. I’m fully aware
of what happens if I make a mistake,”
she says.
“I want to be on Twitter, but
sometimes it’s not pleasant. One day
Gary Lineker tweeted saying I was
good as a co-commentator, which was
unbelievable, and then I got a direct
message on Instagram from someone
calling me ‘a fat, biased slag’.
“The ones that worry me are the
ones that say such things about
females and then you look at the
picture and they are with their
daughter. What?! You’ve got to teach
your daughter to reach for the skies.”like, ‘Massimo, she’s a professional.’
I said to Cellino, ‘Did you send your
daughter to university?’ ‘Yeah, yeah,
yeah.’ ‘Why?’ ‘So she could get a good
job.’ So I said, ‘She gets this good job
and she turns up on the first day and
she meets someone like you who goes
‘Ooh, don’t have her, she’ll sleep with
all the men.’ He went, ‘F*** off.’ I said,
‘I’m right, Massimo. You want your
daughter to be the best and then
you’re saying you can’t have a woman
‘because she might sleep with them’.’ ”
Cellino eventually ended Ward’s
dream job in 2015. Her reputation
restored at the tribunal, Ward wanted
to return to young player welfare. “I
have the skills and the empathy. At
first I thought, ‘Brilliant, I can do
another role.’ Then, as the weeks and
months went by, I’m thinking if
you’ve got a sex discrimination case
against your name in football you’ve
got absolutely no chance of getting
another job.” Even though she won
her case. She went for interviews with
clubs, impressed the chief executives,
“but the owners have gone ‘absolutely
no chance’.
“If it wasn’t for doing BT Sport
and doing the women’s games
[tournaments for BBC] I don’t think
I’d have left the house that year,” she
says. “It was horrific. People were
saying, ‘You’ve got your money now.’
“But the majority of Leeds fans are
brilliant with me. Listen, there was a
co-ordinated social media [attack]
from inside Leeds about certainbrother [Blake] was killed in a car
crash with four others in Doncaster
[in 2014]. I heard on the Sunday and
went to sit with his mum and dad on
the Monday. Horrific. You have to do
that, one, on a human level, and two,
to show the club care.”
The job was relentlessly challenging
and draining. “I had a lad arrested
for rape, which I knew he hadn’t
done,” she says. “I knew what was
going on. He explained it all to me. I
spoke to the police and I could sort of
tell that the police were quite happy
that they’d caught a young footballer,
a black footballer.
“There was a lot of not releasing
certain evidence — one side of text
messages, which told a different story,
without the other side. I was thinking,
‘Hang on a minute.’ I went to all the
court appearances and in the end he
was cleared. He was a good player but
he struggled after that. It destroyed
his career at that level.”
Ward worked hard on the young
players’ characters. “My aim was to
produce well-rounded men who had
respect for everybody, gay people,
women, any [ethnic] minority,” she
says. “I remember a really interesting
conversation with Cellino. He had a
daughter and he was talking to me
about Stacey Emmonds, who was
fitness and conditioning [head of
sport science for the academy].
“She was doing the warm-up with
the 23s. He [Cellino] went, ‘I see the
girl, she will sleep with them all.’ I was‘I felt betrayed
having to leave
Leeds – it was
my dream job’
strange as a girl playing football.
I enjoyed it and I had an older
brother and I wanted to beat him at
everything, so I played football. But
I was stigmatised. When I got to my
teenage years even my friends were
saying, ‘Are you going to stop now?’
‘No! I enjoy doing it.’ ”
Ward had friends who gave up at 11
when the FA ban kicked in on playing
football with boys. “There was a lost
generation,” Ward says with a sigh.
She eventually joined a side at 12,
playing against women aged 20 and
older, then moved to Leeds, playing in
the FA Cup final and working on
academy players’ welfare.
Ward, 47, follows her former
charges’ progress, sends presents
when they have children and praises
their performances via social media
with the hashtag #everywhere.
“Leeds are everywhere,” Ward says,
laughing, and rattles through many
of the players she helped to nurture.
“Fabian Delph was a street fighter,”
she recalls. “I don’t mean he fought in
the street, but he was tough. He’d ring
me up and say, ‘I’ve got kicked out
of school because somebody said
something about my mum, so I
smacked him in the mouth.’ Fab has
such a sense of morality of what he
thought was right
and wrong.
“He wanted to buy
his mum a house.
My mum looked for
a house for her. We
needed to find Fab’s
mum a house
somewhere where
some family
members didn’t
know where she is.
“I’m still in
touch with Fab.
I feel pride by
association. When
he won the league
[first in 2018 with
Manchester City],
I spoke to him
that night.
“I saw Alan
Smith and Scott
Carson come
through. I was there with James
Milner when he was 16. I knew with
Aaron Lennon he would go to the
top. I care for them.
“I sat in on meetings when they got
released. I tried to deal with the after-
effects, especially the parents. I know
Tom Cairney’s mum and dad really
well. They were livid when he got
released because he was ‘too small’.
I said [to the club], ‘The kid’s not gone
through puberty. He’s still a baby.’
Nobody listened to me.” Cairney is
now a fixture at Fulham. “We
released Mason Holgate,” she adds.
Holgate is now close to 100 Premier
League appearances for Everton.
She recalls particularly tending
Alex Cairns, a promising goalkeeper,
now at Fleetwood Town. “Alex’sE
very club needs somebody
with a big heart who cares
for the youngsters. Every
club needs somebody like
Lucy Ward, who was head
of education and welfare for Leeds
United’s academy for 17 years, tending
those who came on trial, those
released, those who suffered tragedy,
and those who triumphed, such as
James Milner, Aaron Lennon, Fabian
Delph and Kalvin Phillips.
Ward has not been back to Elland
Road since she took the Leeds owner
at the time, Massimo Cellino, to an
employment tribunal for sex
discrimination and unfair dismissal in- Now a popular TV and radio
co-commentator, Ward hopes to
return in 2022, schedules and
pandemic
permitting.
Her story is an
extraordinary one,
a tale of sexism,
sadness and
resilience. It is a
story about Leeds
and a story for all
of football. It is a
story of betrayal.
Cellino had
sacked Ward, a
Leeds legend as a
forward for 23 years,
for what the club
claimed was taking
excessive time off to
commentate for the
BBC at the Women’s
World Cup in
Canada in 2015.
Ward countered that
she was dismissed
because she was the
partner of Neil Redfearn, one of the
many managers sacked by Cellino.
Ward won and Cellino was ordered to
pay her £290,000.
It was never about the money. “It
wasn’t a job,” Ward recalls over coffee
in London. “It was my life. I don’t
have kids because I played in the
years that unfortunately for women
we could only have kids at a certain
point. You don’t realise that 14 years
later, when I was with someone I
wanted to have children with
[Redfearn], it just doesn’t happen.
That was difficult. These players were
my kids. They were family to me. For
me, it was a sense of belonging.”
Ward has always been a pioneer.
“Growing up, I was looked on as
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throughIwastherewWard enjoyed a
long playing
career with
Leeds before
moving into an
education and
welfare role
working with
young players
such as Kalvin
Phillips, left.
Right, in her
new career
on televisionLucy Ward, now a fine
TV pundit, helped build
young careers
until her abrupt
ousting, she tells
Henry Winter