Doncaster Rovers Belles' Sue Smith on women's football's fight to go pro

Sue Smith shakes her head when she talks about the old days at Tranmere. Training took place under slithers of borrowed light from the men's floodlit pitches nearby. Her team-mates would step gingerly onto the balding grass, conducting a thorough inspection before covering the dog muck with cones.

Obstacle England's women had to push the FA suits for a £4,000 increase to their annual contracts - the sort of figure some of their male peers might fritter away on a night out - but Smith shrugs acceptingly when she considers the gulf in reward. "Of course you can feel hard done by when you think about the riches in the men's game, or when you see a paragraph in the corner of the paper, while David Beckham's hairstyle takes up a whole page. But the men have had to make sacrifices," she says. "We can walk down the street, go to the shops, go to restaurants and nobody would bat an eyelid. Someone like Wayne Rooney would find that difficult; he'd get bombarded. The women's game is totally different and at a totally different stage of development. It's always been about the love of the sport." The cynics will remain but Smith believes her sport can rekindle romance that has fizzled from shiny stadiums. The antithesis of the Premier League's brazen capitalism, women's football, she says, must retain its roots, its spirit, even as it smartens up its act. "Getting the crowds is still the biggest obstacle we face," she says, suddenly wistful. "When the WSL started we expected thousands of people watching and it was still only a few hundred. Better than it used to be, though: one man and his dog. Even after the Olympics we played Arsenal at the Keepmoat and only got 300 on the gate. We thought, 'Where have all these people who cheered at Wembley gone?' "It's a constant struggle. We've got to get the message out that we're the affordable, friendly face of football. Those who do come to watch say it's refreshing to watch a game that's not all about diving, cheating or fighting. They say it's football as they remember, how it used to be."