While 2011 was widely considered the biggest ever year for women's football in this country, Hope Powell is not one to rest on her laurels, and although we are just ten days into the New Year, the England Women's National Coach has already demanded a week of hard graft from 47 international players. In 2011, women's football was boosted by the launch of The FA WSL, an eight-team semi-professional league which really raised the standard of the domestic game, England's inclusion in the World Cup Finals and the UEFA Women's Champions League Final being staged at Craven Cottage. This year the London Olympics will rightly attract a lot of attention, but England have three crucial UEFA Euro 2013 qualifiers to contend with before focus shifts to the Olympics, and Powell has today taken two different squads to La Manga for a warm weather training camp. "We've been doing it for probably nine, ten years now," she said, of her penchant for a New Year trip to Spain. "Conditions [in England] in January [are] quite cold and the environment to get some real good quality training in with the players is quite difficult. So to take them somewhere mid-January where the weather is a little bit warmer, it means we can do a lot of focused work, hard work. "We will train twice a day, really condensed, really quite demanding and the conditions are conducive to that. It's a really good environment, more importantly we get a lot of good work done in good conditions." For the first time, Powell's ...
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