The Sun Newspaper shares thoughts on who should be the next England Women’s National Team manager!

A more serious report published today on the Guardian website:

Hope Powell’s ruthless brilliance will not be missed by England’s players

Powell took on the pale, male and stale suits at the FA and won but her dictatorial style alienated the England dressing room

When Hope Powell’s dismissal as manager of the England women’s team was announced on Wednesday there was an eerie silence from the current crop of England players. Few of their Twitter accounts even acknowledged the event. Not one expressed regret or sadness. A lone voice was the captain, Casey Stoney, who thanked Powell for “making her dreams come true” in giving her the armband, but tellingly also described her as “ruthless”. It was a strange and seemingly ill-fitting state of affairs.

Meanwhile the Football Association severed all ties with Powell, ruling out any hope of an associated role within the governing body. The director of football, the very job that Powell herself had insisted the FA create to push the game forward, would not be going to the most powerful and recognisable figure in English women’s football. Powell was to be cast adrift. Only the former sports minister Gerry Sutcliffe protested.

Fifteen years of campaigning, of a staunch vision, of determination, guts and sheer doggedness in dragging the women’s game kicking and screaming through the patriarchal corridors of power at Wembley HQ into semi-professional status, had ended thus. Privately the 46-year-old must have wept at such a painful conclusion. Behind the scenes, however, English players exchanged messages of sheer jubilation. “The Dictatorship”, as Powell’s reign had become known, was over.

For anyone outside the women’s game, a close-knit and intensely private world largely unexplored in the national media, this may come as a shock. Powell’s identity as an icon of the women’s game, whose contribution to the sport has merited an OBE and a CBE for her services, has always gone unquestioned. Powell has been championed as a figure to be celebrated, not criticised.

In many ways this has been appropriate. Powell’s achievements in modernising women’s football in this country are heroic, awe-inspiring and downright revolutionary. Powell in the boardroom, say insiders, was a force to be reckoned with. For any woman – let alone a black woman – to take on the pale, male and stale suits of the governing body who had little interest in or regard for women’s football, and demand investment, demand a youth structure, demand central contracts, demand an elite environment in which female footballers could develop, demand parity in medical expertise, should not be underestimated. Powell had to fight prehistoric attitudes and she came up trumps.

For Powell’s role, unlike Roy Hodgson’s or that any England men’s manager, has always been far more extensive than simply coaching the senior team. Powell created an entire infrastructure for women’s football and oversaw its running. She also achieved far more on the pitch than the often cited two Cyprus Cup trophies. Before Powell’s appointment England struggled to qualify for major tournaments; under her reign England reached the European Championship final in 2009 and twice reached the World Cup quarter-finals, in 2007 and 2011. It is a superior record to the men in recent years, despite all their riches.

But beneath the surface, beyond even the obvious failure of a horrific European Championships last month – where England finished bottom of all nations, despite having entered the tournament at an all-time high in the world rankings, and Powell’s stock plummeted with media figures calling for her head – Powell’s position had become increasingly precarious as unrest in the England camp reached fever pitch. No one doubted that on the training pitch, as a tactician with an in-depth and extensively researched knowledge of the women’s game, Powell was excellent. Where she failed to win over her team, however, was in her player management.

One player revealed that she failed to motivate the players, or create any kind of “spirit” within the dressing room. Rather she was spiky, curt, blunt, ruthless. As the former England midfielder Becky Easton, now with Liverpool Ladies riding high at the top of the Women’s Super League, tweeted this week, “If you questioned, disagreed or in anyway upset her … you would be banished for life.”

Overseeing such an extensive number of responsibilities for the women’s game meant that all roads led to Powell, hence the autocrat reputation. Players privately complained that they had no one senior to turn to with their problems – even the Central Contracts appeals panel was occupied by the England manager. As one senior figure in the game said, “There will never be another manager coaching England who had as much power as she had.”

Insiders say the wheels first began to come off when the former Arsenal striker and wunderkind Lianne Sanderson retired from international duty at the age of 22, blaming irreconcilable differences with Powell: “As long as Hope Powell is in charge I don’t see myself going back and I don’t think she would want me there,” she said at the time.

A year later the Arsenal and England midfield star Katie Chapman, the Steven Gerrard of the national side, also retired from the international game months before the World Cup. Chapman, a mother of three, said she had no support with childcare costs or arrangements. There was a feeling of deep sadness around the national squad to have lost two such talented players to off-field issues.

If Powell lost the dressing room then, questions began to be asked outside the England team in the run-up to the Euros. Onlookers asked why Powell failed to select players such as Natasha Dowie, the WSL’s leading scorer at the time with 10 goals in 12 games for Liverpool, or why Powell had not spent more time watching players outside the established names, with the Liverpool manager, Matt Beard, complaining that he had rarely seen or heard from her either there or at his former club Chelsea. And, damningly, as England scrambled for survival in Sweden, questions were asked as to why Powell had insisted on selecting six injured players for her squad and sticking with them instead of Arsenal’s most exciting young talent this season, the midfielder Jordan Nobbs.

As the mainstream media cottoned on to the story and joined in the chorus, those inside the camp say they felt relief. Everton’s Jody Handley tweeted: “Only good thing to come from the tournament and media exposure is that finally people are speaking up!”

Powell should always be remembered as one of the most important figures in the game’s history. Where she became undone, arguably, was as a victim of her own success. It was Powell who raised the bar to another level, who inspired the FA to demand better standards. In a cruel twist of fate that is exactly what the FA has done in sacking her. By Anna Kessel on The Guardian.com