MILLOMITE Martha Allington is following in the footsteps of a famous name from the Furness area in making her way through the ranks at Blackburn Rovers.

The Ewood Park club is where Barrow’s Georgia Stanway honed her craft before eventually forging her reputation with Manchester City where her form has earned her international and individual honours.

For the past three years, Allington, a pupil at St James’ Catholic Primary School in Millom, has been with Rovers’ Regional Talent Club which specialises in the development of young female players in England.

Playing as a centre forward, the 11-year-old, who has also played for Dalton Girls, has found the net regularly, scoring 98 goals for Blackburn’s under-10 side last season and has continued to impress at under-11 level, where she scored 23 goals in the first two months of the current campaign.

Her pace is arguably her biggest attribute as she is one of the top 10 sprinters in her age group in Cumbria, where she competes for Millom Striders.

Her father Steve said: “She’d only been playing girls’ football for six months with the Millom junior team and Blackburn have some strong links with her primary school and they came down to do a bit of a training camp.

“It really started on the back end of that training camp where they asked to see us as parents and they asked her to attend the trials for what was the under-10 intake,but she was only under-9s, so she was a year younger than the age group they were looking for and it’s just snowballed from there, really.”

Naturally, Millom’s location makes travelling down to Blackburn difficult but that hasn’t stopped Steve driving his daughter down for training on Mondays and Wednesdays and for matchdays on Sundays.

Steve said: “It’s a bit of a challenge. Sometimes we’re up at half-past-six in the morning to get down there for the games. We’ve got the travelling time down to 90 minutes, one-way, now, but we need to manage her schoolwork and things like that. She’s that keen to play that she’d rather do this than some of the other things kids of her age do.

"It isn’t easy and financially it’s quite a commitment as petrol doesn’t come cheap these days, but it’s what she loves doing so we’re happy to support her.”