Fifa’s fears that the tournament would be a commercial failure and the players might not last 90 minutes proved unfounded at the Women’s World Championship For The M&Ms Cup
Like much of what is published on Fifa’s website, its account of what it calls “the inaugural Women’s World Cup” is served up with a healthy dollop of official spin and doesn’t quite tell the whole story. The basics are all covered, of course: staged in China in 1991 the tournament was contested by 12 teams and won by the USA, who beat Norway in a final staged at Guangzhou’s Tianhe Stadium and played in front of 65,000 people.
Fifa boasts that, for the first time in the organisation’s history, six female match officials were appointed to help officiate at the tournament “in keeping with the true spirit of the celebration”. One of them, Claudía de Vasconcelos of Brazil, was given the honour of refereeing the third-place play-off when Sweden played Germany. There are, however, a number of far more intriguing vignettes that are notable by their absence from the official account of a tournament at which world football’s governing body claims that “women’s football celebrated its true coming of age”. They serve to demonstrate just how far the sport had yet to go and has since come.
Written by Barry Glendenning
This news first appeared on https://www.theguardian.com/football/2019/jun/18/womens-world-cup-game-changing-moments-no-3-china-in-1991 under the title “Women’s World Cup game-changing moments No 3: China in 1991”. Bolchha Nepal is not responsible or affiliated towards the opinion expressed in this news article.
