Garhwal United Football club women’s team won by 3-1 in Indian Women’s League compitition’ s first match at Kolkata
The Indian women’s league (IWL) is the women’s top tier professional football league in India, founded in 2016, having total of 8 teams from across the country participating in India and the current participants teams are Garhwal United Football club, SESA FA, Kickstart FC, East Bengal FC, Nita F A, Gokulam Kerala FC, Sri bhoomi FC, Sethu FC. The current season of IWL, 2025-26 commenced today at national centre of excellence, Kolkata. The 1st match which kickstarted at 3 p.m on 20th December 2025 at Kolkata under clowdy and chilly weather was between Garhwal United Football Club in their green jerseys and SESA FA in their pink jerseys who have been promoted to this league by virtue of being champion and runners up respectively in IWL-2. From the beginning of the match the Garhwal United superbly dominated their opponent with their solid combination, skill strength and stamina and the result of which was a goal converted against SESA FA at12th minute of the gameby the efforts of Joyce(8) who driblled the ball towards the oppeonents goal post and while struggling at the goal line passed to Kim Kipgen(20) who smartly converted the narrow pass into the goal. The game progressed with Garhwal dominating in the game and players combined well resulting into a pass to Nongrum(10), capatain who displayed her dribbling skills and shooting power from around 30 yards and meticulously converted the pass into the goal at 15th minute. Thereafter SESA FA tried to reduce the margin but in between GARHWAL attempted into their goal many times but finally got an opportunity through Deepa Paul(7) who received a pass from the midfielder and carried to opponents goal post attempting a shot which was deflected and was skillfully maneuvered and nicely converted it into the goal in the 49th minute (extra time of 1st half). The score was 3-0 at first half. In the 2nd half, both the teams tried their best and The Garhwal United targeted the oponent’s goal post many times in first 15 minutes challenging the efforts of the SESA FA, but the opponent’s were desperate to reduce the margin and were successful in converting repeated attempts of Sarjida Khatun(29) in the dying minutes of the game(89th minutes). The match ended with the score line of 3-1 in favour of Garhwal United winning their first match . Two yellow cards were shown to the players of SESA FA while 1 yellow card was against Garhwal United. The Garhwal team was captained by Sanfida Nongrum and coach was Akshay Unni while team manager was Nithin Nair. The match referee was Ruba Devi assisted by Sushmita Rai and Abhirami R T and match commissioner was Biswajit Mitra. The next match of Garhwal is scheduled on 24th December against Kickstart FC.
