Guernsey women's football league to return for first time in six years

A women's football league is set to return in Guernsey for the first time in six years this weekend.

Three new sides have been formed from a pool of 50 players with each squad selected from a draft system to try and make matches competitive.

There has been no women's club football since 2020 when two Guernsey sides played in the Channel Islands League.

The new sides - named City, United and Athletico - will play until January when they hope more sides can join.

The aim is to have a Guernsey side who are able to take on rivals Jersey for the first time since 2016.

The Sarnians were unable to raise a team for the fixture from 2017 to 2019 with plans to resurrect the fixture in 2020 scuppered by the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

"It's been a shame to see it go from what it was, being lots of club teams playing week in week out on Sunday mornings, to pretty much nothing and then trying to build back up again," Guernsey Ladies City captain Steph Batiste told BBC Channel Islands News.

"It'll be really nice just to get some local football going on again, it hasn't gone on for so long and to get that I think is the key, start from this level and try and build up."

Guernsey's women last played at an Island Games in Jersey in 2015 when they finished eighth out of 10 teams

Guernsey Ladies and Northerners played in the last Channel Islands League in 2019-20, with Ormer FC topping a four-team CI league with three Jersey sides the season before.

"We were doing really well before Covid hit playing in the Jersey league, which was massive momentum for us," added Guernsey Athletico captain Joelle Pengelley.

"So we've been set back a bit and had to be a bit creative to create those opportunities locally.

"We've managed to build up a group of girls who are keen to play and created the teams and we're keen to get going."

"It's taken the women's World Cup from a couple of years ago to bring some new faces to the game," added Guernsey Ladies coach Richard Sutton who has helped organise the league.

"I think the sport generally needed a bit of a kick and needed some encouragement and we've needed to grow a lot of youth players and bring them up through the ranks.

"We've done that over the last five years and now a lot of the 12-14 year olds that we started with back in 2016 are now old enough to play football, and them combined with some old faces coming back and some other players we've gained we've slowly built the numbers back up."