NOS Voetbal•vandaag, 08:23
It was September 23 1956. Lenie van der Jagt (now Van Wensveen) walked onto the field with her legs on stilts. She would play the first-ever women’s international match against West Germany. That had to be done without the KNVB, because the union did not recognize women’s football at the time.
Lenie van Wensveen, pioneer of Dutch women’s football
Van der Jagt was 14 years old and just old enough to participate. A year earlier, she had begged the trainer if she could join the team. They were still looking for women, weren’t they? Couldn’t they make an exception for her?
Van der Jagt played football on the street from childhood, among the rubble of post-war Rotterdam. She was technically strong and two-legged. “The boys always came to get me, that was very normal.”
After some insistence, the Rotterdam player was allowed to play for the Dutch team. She secretly took her father’s football boots at home and stuffed wads of newspaper into them so that they would fit. She was hired. In the first international match, she was in the starting line-up and made the only goal as the youngest international.
Watch that very first goal for Orange here:
1956: Van Wensveen scores the first goal for the Orange Women
“I was a bit nervous,” says Van Wensveen modestly. There were 15,000 spectators, including her proud father, she recalls. “Afterwards I had to sign autographs.”
Unusual
How was the reaction to that very first unofficial international match? “Not. People had no idea that match was there,” says sports historian Jurryt van de Vooren. “Lenie only saw the images when I recently turned them up.”
Van de Vooren has known Van Wensveen for several years and this summer put together a mini-exhibition about a century of women’s football for the Media Museum of Sound & Vision.
In 2019, Frank Heinen made this portrait of Lenie van Wensveen:
Final signal: Lenie van Wensveen
How important was that first match in 1956 for the development of women’s football? “Very important,” says Van de Vooren. “There was no official recognition from the KNVB and FIFA at that time. That only came in 1971, after the World Cup for women in Mexico.”
Was it special that women played football? “Women like Lenie thought it was very normal. But of course it wasn’t. Hardly any girl got permission from her family or school at that time.”
They had no role models. “Gien van Maanen, the goalkeeper of 1956, pasted passport photos of women on pictures of men playing soccer in her photo book. That way she could recognize herself a bit in the image,” says Van de Vooren.
NOSThe scrapbook of Gien van Maanen
He calls Van Wensveen and her teammates the pioneers of women’s football. “Everything had to be arranged by themselves. I admire that the most. That they just did it themselves. Instead of: it won’t work, we’ll just do something else.”
‘Ladies like to play football’
Little can be found in sources about the history of women’s football. The first photo of women playing football in the Netherlands dates from 1919.
The image remained negative for decades. In 1933, for example, women’s football was described in the sports magazine Revue der Sporten as ‘a disgusting excess’.
Ten firsts of Dutch women’s football
1908 First call-up for a women’s football club
1956 First unofficial international match
1973 First official international match
1982 First report at Studio Sport
1984 First EC
2009 First live report on TV of the Dutch national team (with national coach Vera Pauw)
2015 World Cup debut
2017 Gold on EK
2019 Silver at World Cup (with national coach Sarina Wiegman)
2021 First female football commentator at NOS Langs de Lijn (Suse van Kleef)
“Women belong behind the sink, they said in my time – except for Lenie van Wensveen,” says Van Wensveen, smiling pityingly.
The Rotterdam native continued to play football into old age. At the age of 75, she broke her hip when she wanted to demonstrate how she scored that very first goal.
She follows the Orange Women at every major football tournament and still regularly watches international matches in her own country.
Who is her favorite Dutch player at this World Cup? “Jackie Groenen,” she says firmly. “A hard worker and she sees through the game. She looks a bit like me.”
Sarina Wiegman predicted the future of Dutch women’s football in 2000, for which she ultimately became responsible:
2000: Wiegman as a player about the future of women’s football
2023-07-22 06:23:25
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