From the ashes: defiant McDermid Ladies stand firm in the spotlight

Think of an impressionist painting. Think of Degas’s pastels of ballet dancers rehearsing: all legs and stretches and skittish bustle. Now replace the satin pumps with football boots and the pale tulle tutus with fuchsia-pink tops, and you will have a sense of the McDermid Ladies in the dressing room of Windmill Community Campus, Kirkcaldy, on Sunday 20 March 2022.

Everywhere: a blur of motion. To my left, the right-back Chelsea Duncan is having her calf strapped with K tape. To my right, the captain, Tyler Rattray – a skelf of a woman yet apparently unbreakable – is shouting for hairspray while out-of-action Katie Donaldson tells the gruesome story of how she slashed her knee when she tripped and fell on her mother’s garden scissors. At my request the striker Demi Gear holds out her arm to show me her tattoos. She points to one: a ball amidst heartbeat pulses on an ECG chart. “That’s how important football is to me,” she says. “It’s my lifeblood.”

McDermid Ladies are preparing to take on Central Girls in the last group stage of the Scottish Women’s Football League Cup and they have every right to be giddy. It is seven weeks since they broke away from Raith Rovers in protest over their signing of David Goodwillie, a player found by a civil court to have raped a woman in 2017. Their principled decision has brought them more attention than a team at their level could ever have anticipated.

Today’s match is particularly nerve-racking. Firstly there is bad blood. The last time the teams met, McDermid Ladies’ youngest player, Daisie Donegan, 15, was red-carded for lashing out at a rival. The dressing room consensus is she was provoked. “The referee only saw Daisie retaliating,” I am told on multiple occasions, “so only Daisie