Sylvia Gore, who has died aged 71, secured her place in football history when she scored the first official goal for England women, helping them to a 3-2 win over Scotland, their fierce rivals, on 18 November 1972.
After years playing club football – at a time when the sport was still formally banned in England for women – Gore was named in the FA-sanctioned starting XI on that day as an attacking midfielder. She already had a strong reputation for technical skill and goal-scoring prowess, before the moment when, in torrential rain, she gathered the ball in her own half and ran the length of the pitch before sidefooting it into the net.
That historic goal is a snapshot of a stellar playing career in which she was likened to her contemporary Denis Law for both her playing style and her instinct for goals – she once scored 134 times in a season. She also had a long career as a coach and manager, including for Wales women, and as an ambassador for women’s football. Almost every female player in the country has benefited from her endeavours, including the England internationals Rachel Brown and Sue Smith.
Domestically, Gore was part of the Fodens team that shocked the dominant Southampton 2-1 to win the 1974 women’s FA Cup; she said some years later that the underdogs had not been frightened of their much-decorated opponents, and was adamant that they had deserved to take the trophy.
She was born in Prescot (then in Lancashire, now in Merseyside), the daughter of Eileen (nee Nash) and John Gore. Sylvia’s footballing education began early, watching her father and uncle play for their hometown club of Prescot Cables and then pulling on a pair of boots herself. She attended local schools, Our Lady’s and St Edmund Arrowsmith, but with no girls’ teams in Prescot, 12-year-old Sylvia joined Manchester Corinthians and spent her teenage years taking two buses to travel there for matches, accompanied by her parents.
Because of the FA’s ban on women’s football, forbidding them to play on official grounds, she had to play on poor pitches with equally poor changing facilities. Gore gleefully recounted later in life that, instead of showers, she and her team-mates would have to use buckets of freezing cold water, or just jump into a nearby duck pond, to have a wash after a match.
Though she played in an era when women’s football was not professional, the game always came first for her. When, as a teenager, she was given the opportunity to take part in an overseas charity tour with Corinthians, she was happy to resign from her less than enthralling office job so that she could travel the world and play football on proper pitches in front of tens of thousands of fans as far afield as South America.
She joined Fodens, originally a works team from the lorry manufacturing plant in Sandbach, Cheshire, in 1967, and played for them and England until she was forced into retirement aged 35 after sustaining a disabling back injury. She immediately concentrated her efforts on coaching and encouraging new generations of players – all as a volunteer. She managed the Wales women’s national side between 1982 and 1989, and continued to coach across the north-west, serving as women’s football development officer in Knowsley over three decades. She became the first female director of the Liverpool County FA, in 2014, and was also part of the Women’s FA, which organised and ran women’s football in England before the FA took over in 1993, after which she sat on its women’s committee and then served as a delegate for the Women’s Super League, launched in 2011.
Gore received a special achievement award at the inaugural FA Women’s Football awards in 1999, and was made an MBE for her services to the game in 2000, the year in which she was also honoured by Uefa in Monte Carlo. As part of the FA’s 150th anniversary celebrations in 2013, she received a special award for her contribution to women’s football, presented at Buckingham Palace by the Duke of Cambridge. She was inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame in 2014 alongside stars of the men’s game including Alan Shearer, Patrick Vieira and Trevor Francis.
Manchester City Women named Gore as their club ambassador to mark International Women’s Day in 2016. She was proud to hold that role, and praised the way the club approached women’s football in a professional way, giving players access to the same facilities as the men.
Gore is survived by several cousins.
• Sylvia Margaret Gore, footballer, born 25 November 1944; died 9 September 2016
