A national disgrace – relegated for finishing fourth.

This blog has never been a place to come to if you wanted to read about women’s football and I doubt it if it will be in the future. Back in October, I started a category on here called Women’s football after I wrote about Wales’ two narrow losses to Norway which meant that they were unable to stop Northern Ireland taking a place at this summer’s European Championships which, it seems to me, should really have been theirs given the relative merits of both squads.

Apart from that, the only other reference to the women’s game I’ve made on here are some fairly brief comments about the Woman’s Champions League Final, which was held at Cardiff City Stadium between PSG and Lyon, that I attended four years ago almost to the day.

Although I watched more women’s games on television this season and thought most of them were of a better standard than you’d have seen about five years ago, my knowledge of the women’s game is not deep enough for me to comment with any confidence or fairness and, to be honest, I don’t really see that situation changing too much in the future.

However, I couldn’t let this story, which I only became aware of this morning, pass without saying something. In particular, how can a team like Abergavenny Women FC be told they are relegated when you look at this final table of the 20/21 Welsh Women’s Premier League?

On the face of it, the decision to relegate Abergavenny looks mad and, what makes things even worse are the mealy mouthed words from the Welsh FA representative at the end of the BBC piece which take up a fair amount of space, but tell you absolutely nothing about how they go about justifying their decision to penalise a team which, it appears, fell only just short of qualifying for European club competition in 21/22!

The Welsh FA says it sympathises, but the qualification process has been “robust”. Robust is a word which I have a problem with when used in a context like that, because I don’t have a clue what it’s supposed to mean – for me, it can be just as effective in trying to cover up a multitude of sins as it is in trying to convey something positive, here it just seems pointless and useless.

So purely on the basis that, hopefully, the more people who get to know about what has happened to Abergavenny, the better the chance of them getting what would appear to be justice, I thought I’d put something together to try and help their cause – I just hope that the decision is reversed or, at the very least, the Welsh FA are forced to offer a more coherent and justifiable reason for their decision than they have so far.