Molly Etchells will finish her latest night shift as a response police officer at 7am on Sunday. She will try to nap for a couple of hours and then, at 1.45pm, her team’s Women’s FA Cup second-round fixture will kick off as they try to earn a place in Monday’s third-round draw alongside Championship clubs.
Football is Etchell’s distraction from her day job and, on a sub-zero Thursday evening in Greater Manchester, neither she nor any of her teammates are deterred by the snow falling as they prepare. “I need it,” Etchells says as she and the rest of the players at fifth-tier Mancunian Unity get ready to host sixth-tier Handsworth. “I don’t feel like I’m a police officer when I’m here. It’s great.”
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The centre-back is not the only police officer in the squad. “Initially, we weren’t going to be able to play on Sunday,” Etchells says, “but we’ve managed to shift swap so we’re doing four night shifts instead of two that we normally do, and we’re going to be playing after finishing.”
Mancunian Unity were formed five years ago as an independent, volunteer-run women’s club by the manager, Phil Burke, and his cousin. They have earned four promotions to move up from county level to the North West Women’s Regional Premier League, and this term in the Cup they have knocked out two higher-division teams, Leeds and Stockport , as well as lower-league Wigan Athletic.
“Being the underdogs and being underestimated, that’s what we thrive off,” Etchells, the vice-captain, says. “Proud is an understatement. The girls have just absolutely smashed everything we thought we were going to do in the FA Cup.”
Their 3-1 victory over one of the sport’s grander names in Leeds has the sound of a Cup classic and Etchells says they were never nervous. Burke explains how the team got their name.
“I’m a proud Manc, born and bred, but I didn’t want to go down the ‘Manchester’ name route because of Manchester City and Manchester United; I wanted something a little bit different,” he says. “And then ‘Unity’ represents what the values and reasons for setting up the football club were and we want everyone who is part of this club to feel part of a football family.
“The reason I started the club was to try and give girls and women the best possible environment in football and to try and give them a pathway and an opportunity to chase and achieve their dreams within the sport.
“So many people around the country would probably go: ‘Mancunian Unity, who are they?’ People often get our name wrong, little things like that, calling us ‘Manchester Unity’ or ‘Mancunian United’, but our performances in this competition will only put our name on the map, and make sure people don’t get our name wrong.
“Every staff member we have is a volunteer. There’s not one person in the club that gets paid a penny for what they do. You can’t thank those people enough. The girls are still paying fees, they’re paying £30 a month. When there are so many clubs in the area where they pay the players, for us to have these incredible women playing for us is an absolute privilege for us. All these people coming together, they’re what makes us special.”
The team train twice a week, on Tuesdays and Thursdays, at Heywood Sports Village and have won eight trophies in four full seasons. In this Cup run they have won £13,000 and they will earn a further £8,000 on Sunday if they win. That prize money remains significantly lower than at the equivalent stages of the men’s competition but still goes a long way, and Burke says it is vital to help “break down some of the financial barriers for a standalone women’s only club reliant on sponsorships and volunteers”.
Those volunteers include his opposition analyst, who has been scouting opponents. Burke says several postponed matches gave him and his coaching colleagues unexpected chances to watch Leeds and Stockport to prepare to face them. “We’ve managed to watch Handsworth now as well,” he says. “Seeing them live myself made a huge difference to our plan. But the girls are the ones going out on the pitch making it happen. We just feel like we’re living in a dream. We don’t want this to end.”
There are 29 ties in Sunday’s second round, including third-tier high-flyers Burnley at home to Bradford of tier five and derbies such as a meeting between Durham Cestria and Chester-le-Street Town, Wolves against Sporting Khalsa and an all-third-tier game between Plymouth and Exeter.
