The first woman to reach 100 England caps says her "lost generation" put women's football on the map

Gillian Coultard is frank about her envy of today's elite female footballers. Throughout her career in the 1980s and '90s, she not only fitted in four training sessions and a match every week around her full-time factory job, but it was an era when competing at the highest level – even for England – actually cost her money.

"Now they can get a job out of it," she says. "We didn't have that. Most of the time, I had to pay my own way to play, even though my employer was supportive, giving me three weeks' paid leave for the 1995 World Cup in Sweden. "I wished I was a man, with what they earned. Football cost me a fortune."

The youngest of eight children of a Yorkshire barmaid ("My dad was around but didn’t stay long"), she was seven when she first joined her four brothers playing football on a local green.

"At school I played football, rugby and cricket – the boys’ sports – and made the boys’ football team," she says. "I was the only girl, of course. No one said I couldn’t play until I was 13 at grammar school. I had to play hockey and rounders instead. But I wanted to play football. It was like my whole world had ended."

Then a teacher put her in touch with the legendary Doncaster Belles, one of the most successful women’s teams in the country. "Twice a week I would get the bus ten miles to Doncaster and back, when there weren’t many buses and less money. A lot of the ‘Donny’ players were much older than me, but they saw me right. I couldn’t wait for Friday training and the Sunday match.

"We were always second to the men, we couldn’t train or play till they were done. It would be dark by then, so we’d use car headlights to illuminate the pitch.

"Away games would be at working men’s club grounds just as the pubs were coming out, and the blokes would shout that we should be at home washing pots, having kids. I didn’t respond. All I cared about was playing better."

With the women’s game in its developmental infancy, age brackets didn’t exist. Coultard earned her first England trial at 13 – she achieved a record 125 appearances by her retirement in 2000. "I treasure representing England," she says. "I’m proud I’m from a working-class background and put something back into Thorne, my home town [in South Yorkshire].

"I watch girls training on local pitches now and it makes me cry because it started off with one – me,” she says, recalling her school days as the only girl in the team. "When I walk down Wembley Way and see everyone with the names of women players on the back of their shirts, I think ‘Wow!’. The FA called us the lost generation. Others had it worse before my era and I’m grateful to them, like those after me are grateful to us. We’ve put women’s football on the map."

The latest issue of Radio Times is out now – subscribe here.

Check out more of our Sport coverage or visit our TV Guide and Streaming Guide to find out what's on. For more from the biggest stars in TV, listen to The Radio Times Podcast.