The physical challenges of boys' leagues

From the start of the 2015-16 season, the Football Association in England raised the age limit at which girls can play in the same matches as boys to 18 years old, from 16.

As you move up the age groups, and the physical discrepancies get more pronounced, it can become harder to justify the benefits for some female players, but there are a number of positives in that move for others.

I am an u15s coach at Teesside RTC, in the north east of England. The RTC, or Regional Talent Centre, model is seen as a professional outfit and can be compared to the regular club-based academies in the boys’ game.

Our role as coaches is to develop girls so they have the best chance of playing at the highest level in the women’s game.

For RTCs, it is certainly more challenging to play against boys’ grassroots sides than girls’ grassroots teams.

Additionally, playing consistently against more physical opponents means players either get stronger and fitter naturally in order to compete, or they find ways around the physicality and develop better technical and game-reading skills to get the half-a-yard they need.

The way the modern game is being played, girls need to have a high level of technical proficiency, understand different formations, be comfortable in playing out from the back from the goalkeeper and play quick combination passes through lines – but this often doesn’t lend itself to getting the best results against more physical boys’ teams. 

"Playing against more physical opponents means players get stronger to compete..."

A common theme in our games against boys would be: we play out well from our goalkeeper and manage to get to the halfway line. We then switch the ball out wide to a winger or striker, but lose the ball through a tackle or bad touch.

The boys then launch one long ball over the top for their fast striker to run onto and put it in our goal.

The 20-30 seconds we worked on playing out and getting the ball up field in a progressive way is all undone in four seconds from a long ball. But from our coaching perspective, this is something we haven’t been too annoyed or disheartened by.

The way we have approached games against boys’ teams is that we wanted to be in control of possession, win the ball high up, play out from the back and try get our attackers 1v1 as much as possible. We accept this isn’t the most effective way to play against a physical boys’ team.

We could have easily played a 5-4-1, with a tight defensive set up and hit them on the counter attack using our fastest players - this may have kept scores down in some games or helped us to more wins.

But the question is, if a scout were here watching the game and didn’t know the gender of the players, who would they be able to pick out and which side looks to have the most potential in the next few years?