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SHELLEY WEBB was not the perfect soccer wife in everyone's book, as Sue Mott related in A Girl's Guide to Ball Games. `Alex Ferguson thought enough of Neil Webb once to pay pounds 1.5 million to bring him to Manchester United. That's when the manager found out about his Achilles heel. She was known as the wife.' The comment is meant to be ironic. Shelley Webb had managed to get on the wrong side of Ferguson by trying to organise a creche at Old Trafford. In the narrow world of the Scot in the hot seat, women were there to provide domestic support for their men, not to agitate for the means to enable them to pursue their own careers.
Shelley Webb has had the last laugh. Tomorrow she will be in her own hot seat, presenting the second edition of her new afternoon sports programme on Liberty 963, Mohammed Al Fayed's fledgling London radio station. Not so much Good Morning Vietnam as Wotcher Vauxhall Bridge perhaps, but from the local paper to Fleet Street nationals to Standing Room Only to BBC World Service Television is an impressive odyssey for a mere appendage of a footballer.
She is small, trim and blonde, and at first glance it is easy to see why Ferguson may have underestimated her. But one challenging look from her piercing corn-blue eyes and you wonder how Ferguson could have got it so wrong. A creche was indeed built.
`Webb, Mrs, is evidently not that dolly-bird, fluff-brained appendage that myth likes to weld to a footballer's side: She Who Must Be At The Hairdresser's,' Mott wrote. `She has a career in television, a first-class honours degree in English and History and a screenplay about women's football on the go.' She is also the Webb...