IF you think the most successful Scottish footballer of all time was Kenny Dalglish or Denis Law, you need to check your gender assumptions. Rose Reilly, a working-class girl from Stewarton in Ayrshire, is, undoubtedly, the highest achieving player in the history of the Scottish game.
She was headhunted at the age of 17, alongside fellow Scot Edna Neillis, by French club Stade de Reims and, months later, by Italian giants AC Milan. Reilly played for a remarkable 22 years in Italy, winning the Serie A title eight times and the golden boot (for top scorer) twice.
In 1984, Reilly won the women’s World Cup and was voted World Player of the Year. However, those accomplishments came not with the Scottish national team, but with Italy.
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Thanks to the rank misogyny of the men who ran the Scottish Football Association (SFA), Scotland was one of the last bastions in world football of a ban on the women’s game. When Reilly played in the first international match of the Scotland women’s team (against England in 1972), the side was unofficial (there wouldn’t be an official SFA women’s team until 1998). Hence she was offered Italian citizenship and a place in the country’s women’s squad.
Reilly’s is an immense story, encompassing, as it does, a life of astonishing achievement and determination. It’s not a tale that’s easily told in under an hour, but that’s exactly what writer Lorna Martin has attempted to do.
In Rose, written for the lunchtime theatre A Play, A Pie and A Pint, Christina Strachan (directed in a tight, fast-paced production by Maureen Carr) gives a high octane performance as Reilly (below). Reminiscences of Neillis (who, sadly, passed away in 2015), of the strains within Reilly’s family over her football career, and of great footballing moments keep the play ticking along nicely.
The drama’s greatest strength, however, is its warmth and humour. Martin’s script and Strachan’s performance give a fabulous, regularly hilarious sense of Reilly being a young, working-class Scotswoman, her head spinning with the new places and new cultures that came with her footballing success.
It took the SFA a shocking 47 years to finally recognise Reilly and her pioneering teammates as Scotland players (eventually awarding them their 1972 caps in 2019). Luckily for Edinburgh theatregoers, they only have to wait two days for the return of this excellent production.
At the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh from Tuesday until Saturday: traverse.co.uk
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