BARLOW: One small step for Forest Green's Dingley, one giant leap for football

History, it's just one thing after another as the saying goes and that's how it seems at Forest Green Rovers, English football's first vegan club, first carbon neutral club, the first to travel to away games on an electric bus.

Last night, on the new-build fringes of a small Wiltshire town on the River Avon, in front of a modest crowd of 696 spectators, they claimed perhaps their most significant piece of footballing history, as they became the first club with a female coach in charge of their men's first team.

Terms such as ground-breaking or pioneering hardly seem to do it justice, as reflected by an unusually large media presence to see Forest Green of League Two stutter through their first friendly of pre-season at the tidy home of Melksham Town of the Southern League Division One South, the eight-tier of the football pyramid.

Hannah Dingley appeared largely unmoved by the fuss. As caretaker head coach, she was mostly impassive on the touchline, passing on instructions to for coaching colleagues to yell out.

With a hand raised to shield her eyes from the low evening sun, she saw her team go behind to a spectacular 35-yard own goal and recover to equalise with a free-kick by Callum Jones, on loan from Hull City.

Just another day at the office for a fully qualified coach who has been head of the club's academy for the last four years.

Supporters were more puzzled by the timing of Duncan Ferguson's exit at the start of pre-season than by Dingley's interim appointment. They are accustomed to chairman Dale Vince's eye for the unorthodox.

'I've always been a contrarian, I guess, and a bit of a rebel,' Vince told Mail Sport last year and when he rolled into Melksham's tidy Oakfield Stadium, 30 minutes before kick-off, he offered