Arsenal legend standing in Gunners' way as icon leads Southampton in Conti Cup
It’s the knees that gives Marieanne Spacey-Cale away. Bare. Exposed. They indifferently confront the biting November rain which has reduced Southampton Women’s physio team to a shivering huddle under the team dugout.
The former Arsenal forward is in uniform and it’s perfect: the black, club-branded baseball cap shielding her short damp curls. The cursory rain jacket (also club-branded) doing nothing more than its fundamental job. The white socks obediently unbudging at her mid-calves. The shorts, in November.
Barring a gleaming wedding ring on her left hand, there’s a distinct lack of razzmatazz about Spacey-Cale. Why should there be? It’s business. Business as usual.
In two days time, Spacey-Cale will lead Championship side Southampton against her former club Arsenal when the WSL behemoths travel to St. Mary’s for a Conti Cup clash. A club record crowd of over 10,000 will be in attendance. For a tournament which features only the 24 clubs between the English game’s top two divisions, Thursday is the dose of romance, glamour and multi-narrative the competition craves. Not that any of that gets Spacey-Cale’s pulse racing.
“How can I get the girls most prepared to do this?” the former England striker says simply when asked about her initial reaction when drawn against the club she won three titles and four FA Cups across eight seasons to cut her one of the English game’s most memorable players.
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“It was nothing more than that,” Spacey-Cale insists, no lingering air of confection accompanying the response. “I had a great time at Arsenal, I’m still in contact with people there. I’ll speak with players and staff that I know.
“But my job is here. I’m in the backseat, trying to drive the players on.”
Current-day Spacey-Cale considers herself calm. "Reflective". But for a striker as feared and insatiable as Spacey-Cale was in her prime, this response is understated, if not underwhelming. The persona, though, is no gimmick, nor a managerial tactic to downplay an occasion that could, realistically, end in her team’s unceremonious thrashing on home turf at the hands of Jonas Eidevall’s ever-reviving attack.
Southampton Women's head coach Marieanne Spacey-Cale faces old club Arsenal in the Conti Cup (Photo by Isabelle Field/Southampton FC via Getty Images)Throughout our interview, Spacey-Cale -- with a soft-spoken, unassuming cadence -- underlines the opportunity to take stock of the gap that still separates Southampton from the WSL’s upper echelons, the place she ultimately wants and expects to be in five years' time.
It’s an ambitious timeline, but if one thing could be attributed to Southampton’s meteoric rise from the Southern Region Women's Football League First Division South in 2018 to the top four of the Championship bidding to break into the top-flight, Spacey-Cale’s unflagging devotion deserves mentioning.
Arriving in 2018 one year after the club revived its then-defunct women’s program and won promotion from Hampshire Women’s League Division 1, Spacy-Cale was hired to head up the club’s nascent Women and Girl’s program.
Five years and three successive promotion campaigns later, Southampton sit third in the Championship after an emphatic 4-3 victory over promotion rivals Crystal Palace. The women’s set-up is fully professional and integrated with the men’s side, while its academy system is now being grown into an FA Professional Game Academy.
Spacey-Cale lifts the trophy after The FA Women's National League Cup Final (Photo by Isabelle Field/Southampton FC via Getty Images)“I had a five-year plan, it was all about building on that,” Spacey-Cale says. “That’s the thing I reflect on most when I do my post-match processing, especially if I felt we should have performed better.”
Such a game arrived not long ago, as Southampton suffered a fourth league defeat of the season in a 2-0 loss to Charlton Athletic. Last season’s promoted side, Bristol City, lost four matches all season.
Spacey-Cale employed her usual recovery process: a long walk, music, a day “shutting out the outside world”.
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“I have to remind myself that we’re still only five years into this. Two of those years were Covid, so we have to remember where we were, where we are, while keeping that eye on where we want to get to.”
Spacey (C) with Rachel Yankey (L) and Ciara Grant during her Arsenal heyday (Ross Kinnaird /Allsport)Maintaining that holistic perspective hasn’t always been easy (on the touchline in the heat of a match she can momentarily abandon calmness). Spacey-Cale also recalls the early days of the job, the temptation to be consumed 24/7 as she stared at the heights she craved.
“Thinking about it, eating it, breathing it, sleeping it,” she says. “There’s a point where you have to go, shut it down. Shut it down and be ready for the next day.
“You can overthink, over-plan, overcomplicate things and that’s where I’ve gotten better. Just breathe. Remember what we’ve done but don’t lose sight of what you want to do.”
Patience has been key to Southampton’s impressive rise through the football pyramid, from their on-pitch possession-based style to their off-pitch philosophy.
It’s a characteristic defender Ella Morris, who has called Staplewood home since a child and was part of the club’s under-16s side when the first-team was revived, credits directly to Spacey-Cale’s arrival at the club. “Knowing not everything is going to happen at once so have that patience and eventually you’ll get where you’re meant to be,” the 21-year-old says.
Taking Spacey-Cale’s instructions without question is easier given the former Gunner’s status in the game. An England international, she made 91 appearances on the international stage and bagged 28 goals. In her final season in north London, Spacey-Cale was the leading goalscorer and the FA Players' Player of the Year, before winning a domestic treble with Fulham Ladies the following year.
“She’s a presence in the changing room,” Morris says, describing the unconscious urge for players to surround their manager in a circle and listen to her speak from the centre. Still, Morris emphasises that Spacey-Cale’s background forms only part of her aura.
Two minutes in the former Lioness’ orbit confirms this. One lift of the ridge of her eyebrow will level you, but her calm demeanour simultaneously makes you feel at peace while leaving you with an impulse to run until you’re blue in the face.
Spacey-Cale’s style has been honed over numerous management stints, from her first with Fulham in 2003, followed by spells in the youth departments of England, Charlton Athletic and Arsenal, before helping lead the Lionesses to a third-place finish at the 2015 World Cup as assistant manager under Mark Sampson.
It’s in Arsenal’s Centre of Excellence that Spacey-Cale garnered a “futuristic viewpoint of coaching”. “I learned the value of knowing where that under-10s player could be in 10 years time,” she says.
Spacey coaching alongside Mark Sampson for England back in 2014 (Matt Lewis - The FA/The FA via Getty Images)Considering her growth from 2003 to now, she says: “It’s about adapting. The thing that drives [my style] is how do you get those individuals into a unit while getting the best out of them?” she asks, delving momentarily into a philosophical cul-de-sac as she describes the myriad ways of doing so.
“You can be influenced by other coaches around you, but I’d never be dictated by other coaches because then I’d lose the soul of who I am.” The sentiment risks sounding mawkish, but the soul of who Marieanne Spacey-Cale is ultimately sits at the heart of what Southampton have become and are bidding to be as she kneads together a new five-year plan.
Against Arsenal in front of a club-record crowd, Spacey-Cale hopes to show precisely this. “The biggest thing will be what we learn about ourselves in a place of pressure,” she says.
“There’s a big crowd coming in. And that will help us as we move back into the Championship season because pressure is building there. We have to be able to deal with that pressure, so if we can learn how to do that from this game, then that’s a good outcome.”
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