England v Australia in Las Vegas: Great Britain Lionesses remember 1996 tour

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England v Australia in Las Vegas: Great Britain Lionesses remember 1996 tour

Sheldon and Thompson knew Nikki Carter, a Hull Vixens player who had management experience from working at a care home. They asked if she would step in as tour manager.

“I was asked: ‘Do you think you could help them out?'” Carter says.

“I was like: ‘What do you mean?’ They said: ‘Go to Australia with them.’ I was like: ‘Hmm, I’d love to. Best go and ask my boss, really.’

“But it suddenly started to unravel. Lots of things that should have been organised 12 weeks out from going to Australia weren’t actually organised.”

The touring party had no flights, no accommodation, no kit.

Sheldon says: “The previous manager, prior to Nikki, had been tasked with securing the flights, and he didn’t secure them and didn’t tell us, so it was only about three weeks beforehand that it all came out that we had no flights.

“My manager allowed me time in work to phone all the airlines to try to get, I think, 32 flights at three weeks’ notice.”

As Sheldon sorted flights, Carter sourced kit, chased hotels and helped to complete the fundraising. “Most of the money was raised in the final eight weeks,” she says. They needed to set up a bank account quickly for the tour. And in 1996, that was a problem.

“There was no bank account set up in Australia,” Carter says, “and it wasn’t like now, where you could ring the bank and say: ‘I’m going to put this money in there and I’m going to spend it from my bank account.’

“One of the girls on the tour, who played for Wakefield, was a bank manager. And she said: ‘It’s not possible to set the bank account up. It took too long.’

“So I ended up going to Australia with a briefcase with £29,000 in cash and travellers’ cheques, because there just was no other way. I carried that briefcase through the whole tour – everywhere I went, that went.”

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