Leading the Line Meets: Lauren McMurchie
From Perth, to Glasgow, then the UAE and now the Midlands. It’s fair to say that Lauren McMurchie has packed a lot into a career that will hopefully recommence on the pitch this weekend.
“My last game for Glasgow City, that was my last competitive game in the UK, the fact that it was six years ago is mad but I’m excited that I’m back.”
My conversation with Lauren McMurchie has been a long time in the making but the timing of our eventual exchange has come at a significant moment for the City legend as she prepares to make her debut for new side, Nottingham Forest, who travel to face Midlands rivals Derby County, at Pride Park this Sunday.
“I didn’t know if I was going to be able to play football professionally again given how much the game has progressed”, shares the 32-year-old, “It took three weeks for international clearance to come through. I’d mentioned it to folk that I had been working with but I started to worry that people were going to think I was a massive fibber so I’m delighted it’s finally done and I can focus on playing football at a competitive level for the first time in a long time.”
It’s fair to say that McMurchie has packed a lot into a career that still has plenty of legs left to run, taking her from childhood training sessions in Perth through success at Glasgow City, injuries (of which there were many), to founding a football community in the UAE and now the Midlands having returned to the UK from the Emirati state a few months ago.
“I pretty much grew up with Lisa Evans but our dad’s probably see each other more in the local pub than we do because we’ve both been here, there and everywhere.”, she laughs as we start our conversation reflecting on her days as a youth at St. Johnstone.
“There wasn’t just Lisa but there was Lana Clelland and Emma Mukandi, amongst others, it was a really good group of girls, it was just our Dad’s training us in the main but they must have been doing something right as people started to take a bit of notice.”
“We ended up taking part in the Gothia Cup (a massive summer youth tournament which invites youth sides from across the world to take part), and before heading over to Sweden we had a training camp in Perth where Eddie Wolecki Black, who was Glasgow City Head Coach at the time, took some of the training sessions. When we came back we ended up involved with the youth set up at City with the aim of hopefully breaking into the first team.”
Aged just 16 she would continue to live at home, heading to Glasgow every Thursday night to train with her new side’s first team before earning a place at the National Performance Centre, along with caps at U17 and U19 level for the national side, “After a two hour session at Glasgow Green I would be getting back home at half ten, eleven so on a Friday morning in school I’d end up sleeping though double French.”
“Then at the performance centre I was training day in day out at Stirling University whilst I was studying. Going from training once or twice a week training to eight or nine times. It was a massive change.”
She would establish herself as a key member of an all-conquering City squad but, like many in the women’s game, injuries would soon start to alter her career trajectory.
“I’m really passionate about injury reduction”, she shares as the conversation turns to one of women’s football’s most hotly debated topics, “I had my first ACL injury when I was 17.”
“I didn’t know anything about it until it happened and then all of a sudden it turns out that everyone has had a brush with it in some way. It’s so multi-faceted, you can do nine things out of ten right but get that one thing wrong, just one time, and that could be it.”
She would bounce back but then pick up a second ACL injury while on international duty for Scotland U19’s before being struck down for a third time at the age of just 20.
“Looking back doing three by the age of 20 was quite traumatic. It becomes more likely you will pick up an ACL injury in your other leg after your first one but I didn’t know that until it happened and then the surgeon was like, “aw, yeah that happens”. I mean what are you meant to do!?”
“After the third one happened I thought, that’s it I’m giving up on football, but while I was grinding through rehab the newest batch of players started to come into the National Performance Centre; players likes of Chloe Arthur, Megan Cunningham and Fiona Brown.”
“One day I heard Fiona had done her ACL, so me and Emily Thomson (another former SWNT international who was involved at the Performance Centre at the same time as McMurchie) went with Fiona to her scan as people who had been there and got the surgical scars.”
“She was a couple of years younger than me and I thought I’d feel really bad if I left her to rehab on her own. I was probably being a bit dramatic at the time, and eventually would have come around to it myself, but our friendship started with doing ACL rehab together, she helped me as much as I hopefully helped her, and that friendship has continued to this day.”
Reflecting on her own experiences McMurchie is cognisant of the challenges facing the players of today, at a time when the game is growing at an exponential rate, and when the physical and mental demands on female footballers have never been higher.
“As females we are all individual and so it’s difficult to pinpoint the perfect solution.”
“I do now think that maybe that jump in training, from once or twice a week to that intensity of club football and the performance school was probably a factor, especially when it came to strength and conditioning which was a totally new way of training to me. At that time I was good enough to play football but I wasn’t fit enough physically, now I’m in much better shape than I was as a teenager because I know how to look after myself.”
“It’s so, so important there is awareness because it’s now happening at a really young age and these kinds of injuries can impact on your everyday life.”
Injuries started to change how the former SWNT youth international began to view her future career, as two further knee surgeries would leave her feeling, at times, a bit part player during a trophy laden run for her club side, not that her teammates and those that run the club let her feel anything other than part of it all.
“I remember one time after one of the injury’s City had managed to get sponsorship for a Champions League trip to Serbia, I wasn’t listed to go but all the players chipped in a little bit of money so I could be there even though I couldn’t play. I did my rehab in Serbia for nine, ten days with the physio. The fact they didn’t leave me behind has always felt like a really powerful moment.”
“I’ll never forget how supported I was during that time. I don’t know why they did it, they could have easily just let me go but they always supported me and that connection I have with the club feels really special, even to the point where I was sitting in Dubai with a huge smile on my face watching them win the title on the final day last season.”
Eventually though the midfielder would decide that after a decade in orange and black it was time for a change, signing off with a goal during a final day of season victory against Hibernian.
“I had played with Glasgow City since I was 16. I was working full time, training four nights a week, playing on a Sunday and I think it became too much of a hamster wheel life. I’ve always really liked travelling and I felt in that moment my playing potential had sort of peaked so I applied for a job to teach PE in the UAE.”
After saying goodbye to her Scottish home she would arrive in the Middle East, although her assignment didn’t immediately take her to a life spent underneath the soaring skyscrapers of an Emirati sky.
“I ended up in Fujairah which is a pretty rural city in the mountains teaching at a girls only state run school. I was the only white female with the other teachers being local or from other Arab countries. It was a real culture shock but it was amazing, I loved working there and understanding how to embrace it.”
The regions large Irish population soon saw McMurchie make friends through football of a different kind, swapping the soccer ball for a Gaelic one and she would grow to love being back involved with sport.
Coupled with her work in a girls only school, the idea of setting up a women’s only club in Dubai started to take shape.
“We would see little boys playing football but they would have sisters and there was nowhere really for them to go, with Glasgow City’s ethos in mind for championing women’s and girl’s there felt like there was an opportunity there to make a difference.”
Onyx FC, the UAE’s first women only football club, was set up in 2021, a name chosen with deliberate brevity to make it easily understood across the many languages spoken in the region but also as a reference to the significance gemstones play in Arab culture. The strength, wisdom and authenticity which the jet black onyx are said to represent aligning with the principles on which the club was founded. Not that setting up a women only club in the Middle East was easy.
“It took a little bit of time”, explains McMurchie, “The football market is pretty saturated in Dubai, there were a lot of private schools with facilities that you wouldn’t believe and a lot of clubs were connected to them so it was quite difficult at the beginning.”
“Social media, word of mouth and working closely with schools to explain the benefits of having separate sessions for young girls were all important. When I was a kid I would have loved a different voice to come in to teach me, and that’s something we built upon.”
“We ended up partnering with Adidas, it wasn’t just about high performance but it was about the power of sport, and that message of female empowerment that the club was striving to spread was something they bought into. They run a lot of things in the region and it was something that we had always targeted. The Qatar World Cup was on while we were over there and we were able to run women only, 3v3 football sessions inside fan zones for all ages.”
That visibility of women’s football in a part of the world where it is only now starting to be seen was one of the reasons that the club came to be but not everything was plain sailing.
“Let’s not lie the UAE is probably a decade behind football in the UK and there is that challenge where women still don’t make those big decisions at a senior leadership level.”
“The first ever eleven-a-side league for women was set up when we were there, there was just four or five sides, and we were part of the consultation process but even within that there was still times you were banging your head against a brick wall.”
“The referee’s we had would be there to learn the game as opposed to necessarily knowing it and unless you knew somebody playing you wouldn’t have known games were happening so the on the ground marketing wasn't great or that accessible.”
“Our team was mainly made up of expats and there were rules put in place so that at least five Emirati players were on the pitch at all times to enhance national pathways, and there was a team in Abu Dhabi that was paying players, same in Al Ain, while we relied on our experience.”
“Most of the teams though were academies filled with fifteen, sixteen year old girls learning the game so that if they wanted to pursue it when they moved away they could. With us having connections in the game we were able to bring over people who had been able to make a career from football, Fiona was one of those, and having her as a visible sounding board for these aspiring players was so important.”
While breaking down barriers on the pitch was important, and can be seen as a tangible legacy of her time in the Emirati state, it was the impact that the club’s growth left off the pitch that has McMurchie smiling again.
“By the time I left we had over 300 women from 50 different nations involved in the club in some way, shape or form.”
“Sometimes it wasn't even about the football it was just about having a safe space to make friends. Dubai can be quite a hard place to do that, kind of like London people are working, working, working all the time. There are people that are still friends because they met at Onyx; that still meet up and play football together.”
“After a training session we’d go for breakfast or sometimes it would be heading to the beach. A lot of the time the sessions weren’t about football, of course some players who were involved did progress and would go on to play for teams in the league, but the idea of it was always to be open and to keep that community feel alive.”
Despite Onyx’s success, after six years, the siren call of home soon began to whisper into the latest addition to the Nottingham Forest squad’s ear.
“I had got to 31 and began to think about if I really wanted to seriously pursue a career in football then maybe I needed to head home. I don’t know if you’ve met anyone who has lived in Dubai but a lot of people say it does have a shelf life.”
“It’s amazing for a time but it is quite far away from home. I was there during COVID and I was getting to the stage in my life where I was thinking about settling down and whether staying there would be where I wanted to do that.”
“It was still one of the best decisions I had ever made but I just felt like it was time to come home. It was really sad, because we all put a lot of work into it and I’m not sure what will happen next, but I loved what we achieved with Onyx FC.”
So McMurchie would return home, sort of, as her next stop would take her to the Midlands where along with pursuing her coaching badges she would eventually sign for Northern Premier Division Nottingham Forest, currently second in the table, 12 points behind leaders Newcastle United in the third tier of the English women’s football pyramid.
“I managed to get along to a training session and had that same feeling that I had during my time at Glasgow City.”
“A good group of players and a good group of staff at a club that really values the women’s team with a vision the future. That along with the real community feel, similar to what we were trying to grow with Onyx, really appealed to me. Football wise as well, it was a chance to still play football at a good level in a really competitive league.”
She is however yet to make her debut. Against Huddersfield Town she would be an unused substitute while last week’s game at home to Halifax would be postponed meaning Sunday’s trip to Derby County provides her with the latest opportunity to start anew.
“It’s been a bit of whirlwind, but I feel ready and I’ll be really excited to take those first few steps on the pitch. It feels more real then as opposed to what you do in training. I’ll try and do as much as I can to contribute to the team on the park, and hopefully with what I have learned, off of it too.”
Her current deal runs until the end of the season and for now focus is on being back on the pitch as a player but a future on the training ground is something that the Perth native is keeping her options open for, with a return to Scotland a potential part of that next phase.
“It’s always going to be home so I will return at some point. I don’t know how soon that will be but what I do know is that I want to stay involved in football, taking in as many experiences as possible, learning as much as possible, talking to everyone.”
“I want to see what I can do playing for another year or so but I’m also going to do my B Licence and I’m an advocate for more female coaches and increasing the number of female staff involved in the game, I want to find solutions for the injuries that affected me and that continue to affect everyone.”
“At the moment I don’t exactly know what all that means but what I do know is that I want to make a difference.”
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