Vera Pauw’s long and winding road leads back to Glasgow

A 3-0 defeat away to Scotland 23 years ago this month, at Clyde’s Broadwood Stadium in Cumbernauld, on the outskirts of Glasgow, was a dispiriting way for the Republic of Ireland to begin their category B European Championship campaign.

For the home team’s coach, though, the result was a notable one because it marked her first competitive game in international management with a victory, Scotland having only played friendlies since her appointment to the job a year and a bit before.

Twenty-four years later and Vera Pauw returns to Scotland, this time in charge of the Republic, seeking an outcome that, she says, would give her as much pleasure as anything she has achieved in a lengthy coaching career.

While the 59-year-old has managed nations in both the European Championships and the Olympic Games, she has never made it to the World Cup. So, a win over Scotland at Hampden Park tonight would either break that duck or, at least, give her and her charges a strong chance of achieving the feat in New Zealand next February.

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Pauw was always going to be a coach. Having studied physical education in university and then specialised in coaching and sports management, she combined her playing career with a staff job at the Dutch FA, where she was involved in youth development. By the age of 24, she had her Uefa A licence and was subsequently appointed a Fifa instructor, giving coaching courses around the world.

She called time on her playing career in May 1998, at the age of 35, having amassed a then record 89 caps for the Netherlands. It was during that time that she formed a relationship with her then national coach, Bert van Lingen, 17 years her senior, the pair later marrying and still together after almost 30 years.

A highly respected figure in Dutch football, van Lingen was a long-time sidekick of Dick Advocaat, his assistant during his spells as Dutch, Belgian, Russian and Serbian manager, among sundry club roles.

When Advocaat brought him to Glasgow as his assistant in the summer of 1998, after he was appointed Rangers manager, Craig Brown, then Scottish manager and technical director, took the opportunity to offer Pauw the same roles with the Scottish women’s team.

‘I grew up as Vera, I didn’t grow up as a girl’

And there started a career that has seen a globe-trotting Pauw take on posts in Scotland, the Netherlands, Russia, South Africa, Houston, Thailand and, since 2019, Ireland.

She was born in Vianen in the province of Utrecht, one of triplets, the other two being boys. “I grew up as Vera, I didn’t grow up as a girl,” she said. “That means that I grew up like a boy with the values of boys and with the demands of boys.” That experience fuelled her passionately held belief that she holds to this day: that girls should play mixed-gender football.

Most of the coaching roles that she later took on required building from the bottom up in countries where the women’s national teams were shown little or no support from their associations.

Scotland fell in to that category, as did the Netherlands when she took on the national job in 2010. She played a key role in developing the women’s game in her native land, and led the national team to their first European Championship finals where they lost out to an extra-time goal against England in the semi-finals.

Like any coach, she received mixed reviews after every post, some of which ended acrimoniously. “I was bullied and framed,” she said after she quit the Dutch job in 2010. Pauw would subsequently make rape and sexual assault allegations against figures in Dutch football.

“Banyana Players Happy Pauw’s Gone!”, read the headline in South Africa’s Daily Sun after she departed that role, having led the team to the 2016 Olympic Games. “She is probably the best coach I have ever worked with in my career,” captain Janine Van Wyk countered, questioning the professionalism of the complainants.

Her one season with Houston Dash, the only club job in her career thus far, resulted in a flurry of Twitter allegations about her treatment of players there, led by former Dash player Haley Carter, who went on to become assistant manager of Afghanistan’s women’s team.

Pauw insisted that the allegations were “absolutely nonsense” and that all through her life she “was standing up for others being abused, against intimidation, even if it’s to the cost of myself”.

Next up Thailand, where she was an “adviser” for the women’s national team. She quit the role three days before their opening World Cup game. “When you quit at that short notice,” she said, “then something is really going on”.

Not all her players, then, have appreciated her often unforgiving approach to her role, including, privately, a number of her Irish squad. Pauw is, though, unapologetic on that front. “We have a Dutch saying that ‘a soft doctor makes stinking wounds’,” she once said, “coaches who do not say the truth and who are not direct make it easy for themselves”.

But her handling of Tyler Toland should remain a blight on her time at the helm of the Irish team, Pauw’s treatment of the then teenager, when they first crossed paths, hard to comprehend.

Her obliviousness to the power imbalance, when she used her position to publicly denigrate Toland’s club career, often with “stats” that were simply untrue, was a hard watch, and unforgivable.

The FAI was nervous enough about it all to send a very senior official to the Toland home to inquire about the dispute, despite publicly standing by Pauw.

Toland, meanwhile, is trying to rebuild her career in Spain with Levante, her time with Ireland done for now, having represented her country all the way up from schools to senior, never causing a problem for any of her coaches along the way.

She’s worth remembering in all of this, not least because the experience led her to the darkest of days. And not one of her team-mates, despite private support, spoke out.

But all that will be forgotten if Ireland see off Scotland and, one way or another, qualify for the World Cup.

Winning is, after all, everything. Everything else is a stinking wound.