Matildas star Mary Fowler has kicked off her 2026\/27 Women’s Super League season by scoring Manchester City’s opening goal in a 3-1 win over Birmingham City.<\/p>\n
Bunny Shaw was player of the match for her double, but Fowler started the day with a brilliant first-time strike to set the tone for the reigning champions.<\/p>\n
After a goalless first half, Fowler worked down the right wing, where her cross was deflected and Neve Herron’s hack ended at the feet of Laura Blindkilde Brown.<\/p>\n
She then tried a second cross and, after another failed clearance by Geum-min Lee, the ball returned to Fowler, who fired a first-time strike into the bottom right corner.<\/p>\n
Her 49th-minute goal was quickly followed by Shaw’s first, nodding home a well-directed corner from Kerstin Casparij.<\/p>\n
Shaw, last season’s leading scorer and Professional Footballers’ Association player of the year, repeated the feat in the shadows of full-time before newly promoted Birmingham got a consolation goal through Oceane Hurtre in the 90th minute.<\/p>\n
“The most important thing was to get the \u200bwin \u200cand start off on the right foot. I think we did that today \u2026 we have to keep on going,” Shaw told \u2060Sky Sports.<\/p>\n
Fellow newcomer Charlton Athletic was \u200calso given a tough \u200cintroduction to the top flight as Grace Fisk scored twice in Liverpool’s commanding \u200c4-0 victory.<\/p>\n
Crystal Palace, who finished second behind Birmingham in WSL 2 last season, enjoyed a happier return to the \u200ctop \u200bdivision, beating Everton \u20601-0 through Lexi Lloyd-Smith’s 34th-minute winner.<\/p>\n
Last season’s runners-up Arsenal secured a 1-0 win at Brighton & Hove Albion earlier on Sunday, with 19-year-old winger Lisa Baum marking her club debut by surging forward \u2060from midfield and finishing left-footed from a tight angle in the 10th minute.<\/p>\n
Arsenal’s north London \u200crival Tottenham Hotspur \u200ceased to a 3-1 win over West Ham \u200bUnited, with Scotland forward Kirsty Hanson scoring twice on her Spurs debut.<\/p>\n
The WSL season will pause after its first month for a brief international window from October 5-13, during which Germany will host the Matildas for a friendly.<\/p>\n
ABC\/Reuters<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matildas star Mary Fowler has kicked off her 2026\/27 Women’s Super League season by scoring Manchester City’s opening…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":882643,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,122774,596,2354,28533,85,106080,6339],"class_list":["post-882642","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-birmingham-city","tag-football","tag-manchester-city","tag-mary-fowler","tag-sports","tag-womens-super-league","tag-wsl"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882642","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=882642"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/882642\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/882643"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=882642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=882642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=882642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}