[3] Matthew (or Graham) is known as a leading player and team captain from the 1890s,[2] and for recruiting the first black woman footballer, Emma Clarke.

[1] Inaccurate modern reports (including in the New York Times) claimed she founded the first women's teams in 1881, but this is not backed by any primary source.

[1] A new club was founded by suffragette Nettie Honeyball and manager Alfred Hewitt Smith, named the British Ladies' Football Club or the Lady Footballers, who arranged tours usually as North v South or Reds v Blues matches; Matthew, as "Mrs Graham", played as a goalkeeper and sometime team captain.

According to the historian Stuart Gibbs, "Horse racing was a common target for the radical wing of the suffrage movement so it seems unlikely that Helen with her links to the racetrack would have been a suffragette".

[7] Matthew was recorded as still being a Preston supporter in her 70s in Newton Abbot, and following the team's 1954 FA Cup Final from a hospital bed.