Leeds Win at Last (Leeds Carnegie)

A team retrospective on Leeds Carnegie’s League Cup win in February 2010, on a freezing pitch at Rochdale’s Spotland, turning a run of runners-up medals against Arsenal into winners’ ones with a 3-1 victory over Everton. Ellen White, then an England Under-23 striker, set up the opener for Katie Holtham with a long-range shot that rebounded off a defender, then scored twice more. Goalkeeper Carly Telford recalls assuming referee Sian Massey would call it off, and Sue Smith gliding up the wing on solid ground. The squad was stacked with young talent, several of them graduates of the FA’s National Player Development Centre, but Leeds Metropolitan University declined to fund a WSL application and the club folded, leaving a lingering sense of what might have been.