Foot & Soccer

Emma Hayes, Carla Ward, and exhaustion in the women’s game

Emma Hayes, Carla Ward, and exhaustion in the women’s game

“I just feel re-energised,” Emma Hayes said after her first game in charge of the US Women’s National Team (USWNT). “You can see we’re building something.”

And so Hayes begins the building blocks of a new project, breathing new life into the USWNT, an institution and nation iconic to the women’s game. A game that, in England, Hayes not just breathed life into, but was perhaps close to the beating heart of for over a decade.

Wherever one may place the beginning of the recent revolution of women’s football into mainstream media in the UK—even without the relative luxury of history or hindsight—Hayes will undoubtedly lurk somewhere where the pin drops. After helping to painstakingly carve the face of women’s football in England into something unrecognisable in her 12 years at Chelsea, it was probably a surprise to no one that she had not “another drop to give it” when she announced her departure. 

Her departure was naturally paralleled in the press with the exhaustion Jürgen Klopp lamented in his announcement of leaving Liverpool after nine years with similar language, but perhaps the more appropriate and productive comparison in English football that slipped out of the frame at the season’s final whistle was Carla Ward at Aston Villa.

Artwork by Onkar Shirsekar

Whilst these three exits all brought into question the personal price of football’s most successful minds, for Hayes and Ward, it was the burden of balancing a drastically changing job role, pressures, and home life.

What parts of the job, then, make them, as Jan Verwoert broadly questioned in ‘Exhaustion and Exuberance’, “utter the magic words I Can’t?” In his 2008 essay, he suggested that we had entered a culture in which we no longer just work, but perform. 

We can infer from the bits Hayes “won’t miss” that the media aspects of a top WSL managerial job were ones she lamented. Her emotion, her transparency, her poetry were indeed acts of this performance….


Source link : https://www.footballparadise.com/emma-hayes-carla-ward-and-exhaustion-in-the-womens-game/

Author : Juliet Nottingham

Publish date : 2024-06-27 13:30:00

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