Hello and welcome to the Arsenal Women Askastast on AskBlog.com with me, your host, Tim Stillman, slightly different episode for the extended March international break.

A subject that's very, very close to my heart, as someone who's been going to watch

Arsenal Ladies, first game I went to was April 1996, been going relatively regularly since

then, and definitely the last kind of, I don't know, 15 years or so,

even more regularly than that is the history of Arsenal ladies,

something I'm very passionate about on both the men's and the women's side.

So on the men's side, I've contributed to a book,

which literally deals with how Arsenal Football Club was formed in 1886 with Andy Kelly and Mark Andrews.

But on the women's side, the level of detail is so, so difficult because there's,

particularly in the early years, there's so little documentation or reliable documentation

and recording fixtures of games, of players because of a lack of reporting.

And something my guest who I will introduce presently has been doing over the last kind of few months,

few years really, is really trying to piece together a lot of missing data, correct, stuff that's in,

maybe in the public domain that's not quite right, but really, really try to build this sense

of Arsenal ladies' history, because I think most of us, you know, we see the years that Arsenal

have won the FA Cup. There's the song the fans have about, you know, we've won the FA Cup 14 times in counting and all of that. And I think people have a

sense conceptually that Arsenal ladies, you know, have won the FA Cup more than anyone else.

They won the league more than anyone else. They've won the League more than anyone else. They've won the

Champions League infinitely more times than any other British team. But I think the detail, so much of the detail

of all of that is missing, particularly from the late 80s when Arsenal ladies are formed by

Vic Acres and Alan Sefton and Arsenal in the community and the early 90s, because for the

first few years,

...