WOMEN'S football has come a long way since having to get their gear off for a Matildas calendar. Now they can’t get their gear on.

And when I say gear, I specifically mean shoes.

Every time Ronaldo launches a new line of two-years-in-the-making, mould-to-your-foot, syphon-off-sweat-designed shoes or one of the guys I play with arrives wearing the latest, softest, most aerodynamically perfect Harry Kewell kangaroo leather shoes, a little part of wants to quote Shannon Noll, who quoted Moving Pictures in saying: ‘What about me? What about a shoe that moulds to my foot?'

Sure, this sounds like a self-indulgent blog. Who really cares about me and my shoes? But that's the point. It's not just me and my shoes - it's lots of girls and their shoes. Because for some epic-fail reason, football manufacturers and sporting goods retailers haven't cottoned onto the fact that women play football and that women who play football need shoes.

Ben Buckley himself declared that participation in women's football is increasing by an average 6.3 percent annually, that football is the fastest growing women's sport in Australia, and that women's football is also undergoing international growth.

Yet every half decent looking shoe - invariably something like the Nike T90 - that I've ever pointed to and said, Little Britain-style, ‘I want that one' is met with a firm ‘They don't come in junior [or women's] sizes'.

I'm not after a Manolo Blahnik, but I really do draw the line at having to buy and wear the-only-ones-that-fit-me junior shoes with juvenile, fluoro yellow, Thomas-the-Tank-Engine-esque frickin' designs on them.

Manufacturers and retailers don't understand that women are a completely different market segment from men and junior boys. They wouldn't dare market a girl's moisturiser or perfume to men, even if was it an identical product-they'd put it in a different bottle and tell everyone it was made for men and men only. Yet they consider it A-Okay to relegate women to shopping in the junior boys' section or to force them onto the web to take potluck ordering from blurry thumbnails and international sizes.

Do they not understand how much women spend on shoes annually? That they have the potential to sell us not one but many pairs of shoes?

Frankly, I'm surprised that the normally money making savvy Nike haven't already cottoned onto and cornered this lucrative secondary market.

One clever dick at a major sporting goods retailer told me that they don't stock women's shoes because they don't really sell and I had to remind him - chicken and egg argument-style - that it was incredibly hard to sell something that they don't stock and won't order in. Me standing in front of him with both the need and the cash to address it asking about women's football shoes and being able to think of at least another 10 girls in the same boat is anecdotal proof that there is a demand for women's shoes. It might not be as large as the men's market but it's there and it's growing. My guess is that this same sports retailer is noticing a spike in sales of their junior shoes and is attributing it to lots of kids taking up the sport.

Women's football shoes represent a viable, emerging market for these companies at little extra cost. Unlike shirts and shorts where they need to design to accommodate different pink-bit lumps and bumps, shoes are pretty straightforward. Give or take varying degrees of hairiness, smelliness, length, and width, the component parts of feet are pretty much the same. Why not extend the ranges through a greater number of sizes?

In fact, the half-decent, smaller men's shoes don't even necessarily have to be called ‘women's'. Think of them as shoes for ‘men with small feet'. Because just because women's feet might fit into junior shoes, doesn't mean we have - or will be satisfied with-junior tastes.

Fiona Crawford is desperately seeking decently designed, semi-attractive new indoor football shoes in a men-with-small-feet women's size 7.