The parent trap Men in football get full rein to pursue their dreams while women compromise

Famously, when Emma Hayes was agonising last autumn over whether to leave Chelsea and take the US national team job, she sought the advice of her son, Harry, at bedtime.

- Jonathan Liew

"Let's go to the USA, Mummy!" came the reply, a moment that Hayes later described as the "endorsement" she needed. And so we must at least brook the extremely funny possibility that an entire era of modern women's football from this season's enthralling WSL title race, to the trajectory of Chelsea, Lyon and their European rivals, to the fate of the next Olympic Games and World Cup will swing on the verdict of a sleepy five-year-old child.

And, frankly, why not? When you consider some of the decisions adults have taken for the health of the game in recent years, it's hard to make the case that children would have done a markedly inferior job. A five-year-old child would certainly not have sanctioned the introduction of VAR, because waiting is boring, and they would have been right. A five-year-old child could have devised far better World Cup venues than Qatar or Saudi Arabia, although it remains to be seen whether Pizza Express would have had the capacity to host a gathering of such magnitude.

But this influence cuts two ways, and it is with a certain regret that English football bids farewell - for now-to the Aston Villa coach, Carla Ward. Not sacked, or poached, or hounded out, but worn down. Worn down by the interminable commuting from Sheffield, by the long unsociable hours of travelling and training, by the missed parties and parents' evenings, by that very particular parental guilt of trying to maintain a career and a human being at once, and feeling like neither is getting the best of you.