Sylvia Gore, English football player and manager, Died at 69

  Sports

Sylvia Gore was born in 1946, in Prescot, Merseyside and died on September 9, 2016.

She was an English football midfielder and coach.

She scored the England women’s national football team’s first goal in its first official match, a 3–2 win over Scotland in Greenock in 1972, and was involved in women’s football for 60 years.

She was raised in the north-west of England.

Sylvia Gore attended Our Ladies’ Junior School and St Edmund Arrowsmith Secondary School.

Her father and uncle both played football for Prescot Cables and encouraged her to take up the game.

In the past, the headteacher of her school vetoed any participation in the school team but she joined Manchester Corinthians in her early teens.

During 1972, Gore paid around £2,000 to progress through a series of trials for the first England team.

Sylvia Gore was accepted onto the team and made history by scoring the team’s first goal in its first match on 18 November 1972.

She was a member of the FA women’s committee for 20 years, and in 2014 she became the first female director at the Liverpool County Football Association.

She was known as the Denis Law of women’s football and once netted 134 goals in a season.

When she had stopped playing at the age of 35, Sylvia Gore managed the Wales women’s national football team from 1982 to 1989.

Also, she spent many years as a voluntary girls’ football coach in her native Merseyside.

She won a special achievement award at the inaugural FA Women’s Football Awards, in 1999.

During the 2000 New Year Honours, Gore was made an MBE for services to girls’ and women’s football.

Sylvia Gore was inducted into the National Football Museum Hall of Fame in 2014.

She died due to cancer.

Sylvia Gore passed away at 69 years old.