Last year, Brooke Cochrane, captain of Newcastle United Women, was at an awards dinner when she saw a guest she wanted to buttonhole.
It was a Newcastle United Foundation awards night and Cochrane was there to present an award. Also there was one of Newcastle United's new owners: Amanda Staveley.
Staveley had already mentioned the women's team in the media, so Cochrane, knowing that shy bairns get nowt, took the opportunity to do a bit of networking.
“I was just being cocky, because I am cocky,” says Cochrane. “I went, ‘Oh, you’re going to have to come and see the girls, and she said, ‘Yeah, we will’.”
Staveley stuck to her word and earlier this month she met the whole team to explain the five-year vision she has for Newcastle United, both the men's and women's teams.
Even just the fact that Staveley showed an interest was appreciated by Cochrane: “It was nice to be recognised and have her come down and see all the girls and literally just have a conversation.”
Similarly, another of the club's new owners, Mehrdad Ghodoussi, has also shown his eagerness to raise the profile of the women's team. Ahead of this weekend's FA Cup tie against Ipswich Town he tweeted: “See you on Sunday, can’t wait to cheer you on!”
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Explaining how it feels to have such public support from the club after many years of neglect, Cochrane said: “The girls love it because you’re being recognised aren’t you. Just from them tweeting us, saying good luck or well done, that makes other people notice us.
“There’s so many people who don't realise that there is a women’s team, but there’s so many people that do now and follow us just from that, it’s massive.
“Honestly, our following has boomed so much in the last three to four months, it’s crazy. It’s massive. It’s absolutely massive, and it’s just going to get bigger.”
All of which is encouraging to anyone who has watched the rising tide of women’s football - now regularly broadcast on television - and wondered why Newcastle United are not part of it.
“A big part of it is money,” says Cochrane. “All these big clubs, so your Arsenal, your Man City, your Chelsea, your West Ham, have had high investment from the men’s club for however long they’ve had it. Whereas Newcastle haven’t."
Cochrane adds: “With the new owners coming in I think there will be a lot more investment in the women’s team.”
Even without that potential investment though, this season the team has made its way to the top of the National League Division One North, which is the fourth tier of women’s football in England.
Unlike players in the top tier - the WSL - none of Newcastle’s players get paid a salary to train twice a week and play at the weekend. Cochrane works for the foundation, teaching about health at schools.
She developed her love for the game growing up in Blyth and playing with her sisters, kicking the ball against a wall in the garden, and playing with boys in the local field, all encouraged by her dad.
“My dad always had me playing out,” she says. “I was never sat in the house doing nothing. As soon as you got in from school you were in your shorts and t-shirt and you were out playing.
“X-Boxes and PlayStations weren’t ever involved in my life. It was, ‘Get outside and go and play.’”
When she was about 10 her dad saw that Blyth Town needed players, so she joined up and made it to the Newcastle Centre for Excellence, then played for Whitley Bay, before joining Newcastle United and being made captain. Now 29, she has driven the team on, regardless of takeovers.
“We’re top of the league at the minute,” she says. “We’ve got an FA Cup game on Sunday and it’s the furthest we’ve been in over ten years. So I think what we’re doing already, without any money or any financial stability or anything like that, the club’s in a good place.”
Their fourth-round FA Cup tie will be against Ipswich Town, who are top of their division, which is in the tier above Newcastle. Usually Newcastle play their home matches in Woolsington, but this weekend's match will be played at the home of Newcastle Falcons in Kingston Park.
When they play in Woolsington the crowd has reached up to about 300 recently - “It’s probably the biggest it’s ever been,” says Cochrane - but the hope is there will be more there this weekend, including by the sounds of things at least one of the clubs owners.
Not that any of that will distract Cochrane from what’s important: “There’s a lot of big things going on around Newcastle, but every training session, every time we’re together as a team, it doesn’t matter what’s going on outside our bubble, it’s what goes on inside out bubble that matters.”
The match will kick off at 2pm on Sunday at Kingston Park Stadium. The gates open at 12.30pm. Tickets are free for under-16s and concessions, and tickets for adults are £3.
