Factory trailblazers raised bar for women's football on 'Tour de France’  

Jeyes provided special kit bags but their tour was self-funded and a relative unknown called Johnny Logan was enlisted to play at one of their fundraisers in the Drake Inn

REUNION: Back row, from left, Imelda Noone, Tommy Delaney, Kathleen Ramsbottom, Ann Delaney, Kathleen Caulfield, Margaret O'Connell, Ursula Grace, Joseph Noone and Patrica Noone, with, front row, Connie Jordan, Teresa Walsh, Catherine Rafferty, Linda Gorman, Carol Neary and Teresa Doyle during a reunion event, at the CityNorth Hotel in Meath, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Jeyes team from 1972 who went on a four-game tour of France. Jeyes were a Dublin-based factory women's team who accepted an invitation to travel to France for a mini tour that included taking on Stade de Reims. Photo by Stephen McCarthy/Sportsfile

It was the very first time that Kathleen Caulfield tasted Coca-Cola, or at least that’s how she remembers it as the baby of the Jeyes team that went on a landmark soccer tour in France in the early 1970s.

She grew up playing in the midst of the ‘shilling-a-man’ street games in Cabra West until someone told her that a local girls’ team had finally been set up.