Think of an impressionist painting. Think of Degas’s pastels of ballet dancers rehearsing: all legs and stretches and skittish bustle. Now replace the satin pumps with football boots and the pale tulle tutus with fuchsia-pink tops, and you will have a sense of the McDermid Ladies in the dressing room of Windmill Community Campus, Kirkcaldy, on Sunday 20 March 2022.
Everywhere: a blur of motion. To my left, the right-back Chelsea Duncan is having her calf strapped with K tape. To my right, the captain, Tyler Rattray – a skelf of a woman yet apparently unbreakable – is shouting for hairspray while out-of-action Katie Donaldson tells the gruesome story of how she slashed her knee when she tripped and fell on her mother’s garden scissors. At my request the striker Demi Gear holds out her arm to show me her tattoos. She points to one: a ball amidst heartbeat pulses on an ECG chart. “That’s how important football is to me,” she says. “It’s my lifeblood.”
