• There is always drama in sport - why should that exclude Women’s World Cup?
• Nobody is forcing anybody else to watch it or forcing anybody to say they like it.
Image: REUTERS
I am about to indulge in an epic bout of virtue-signalling. I am about to try hard to be liked. I am about to labour diligently to appear ‘woke’. That’s what some men hurl at anyone who writes or says anything that suggests even a remote interest in the Women’s World Cup. It is always men, often emoting in capital letters, that sophisticated literary device of the impotent.
A woman who ventures an opinion on the Women’s World Cup — or indeed any sport — on social media is subjected to the same level of crude, sneering abuse she gets all the time. A man who ventures an opinion on the Women’s World Cup is regarded as a fifth columnist, a dissembler trying to collapse the edifice of Man from within.
The truth is that the Women’s World Cup is acting as a device not only to shine a light into the well of misogyny that still bores deep into the fabric of this country but also to separate those who love sport from those who see it merely as a theatre for tribalism and prejudice.
It separates those men and women who are enjoying watching the tournament and learning more about the stories of its protagonists from those who feel so affronted by an informed, articulate all-female BBC panel of presenter Gabby Logan, former England defender Alex Scott, ex-Scotland international Gemma Fay and retired US keeper Hope Solo that they think it would be funny to doctor a picture of them so they’re holding irons instead of microphones. So original.” Liverpool’s central defender Tommy Smith once said of Bill Shankly.
“If there was nothing on at Everton, he’d go to Manchester. If there was nothing on in Manchester, he’d go to Newcastle. If there was nothing on at all, he’d go to a park and watch a few kids kick a ball around. He was one of them fellas.”
I’m like that, too. So are most of the sports fans I know, men and women. Good sport is when two teams or two individuals or five horses or 20 F1 drivers or 100 golfers are trying their best. That’s all I want. I don’t like friendlies or exhibitions or testimonials or dead rubbers or matches when Nick Kyrgios is in a bad mood.
If you love sport, you’re always looking for your next fix, scouring the paper for fixtures. Last November, when I went to Alabama to interview Deontay Wilder, I walked over to the Bryant Denny Stadium in Tuscaloosa to watch the University of Alabama play The Citadel in a college football match. A few days later, I went to a women’s college basketball game against Clemson at the Coleman Coliseum.
I love sport because of the contest. I love sport because of the way it brings the best out of competitors. I love sport for its excitement and its unpredictability and what it tells you about the people who are playing it. I love it for the stories of their rise or the stories of their fall. Why should any of that exclude the Women’s World Cup?
I love it for the triumph over adversity it often produces. And that applies whether it is men or women, football or golf, a parks pitch or a fancy stadium. That’s the thing about sport; there is always drama to be had. The arena in which it takes place is largely irrelevant. Why should any of that exclude the Women’s World Cup?
The best sport I watched on television last week was France v Norway from the Stade de Nice, a match between two technically accomplished teams, a game that had skill, pace, a comical own goal from France’s central defender Wendie Renard and a dose of VAR controversy. It felt like another symbol of the pace at which the game is advancing.
No one is making radical claims for the women’s game. It’s sport. Sometimes the games are good. Sometimes they aren’t. Sometimes they are graced with sublime moments of skill (see Nikita Parris’s nutmeg for England against Scotland) and brilliance (see Vanina Correa’s goalkeeping display for Argentina against England on Friday night). Sometimes they are a grind. That’s sport, too.
Nobody is forcing anybody else to watch it. Nobody is forcing anybody else to say they like it. And yet make a simple observation about a match at the tournament in France and it often seems to lance a boil that oozes invective and abuse. And if a woman has the temerity to comment on a game, the abuse is multiplied.
There are some tentative signs of shifts in attitude. One respected sports writer observed on Saturday that she had noticed a change in the timbre of the comments addressed to her, that they were more serious and engaged. “There have been loads that have filled my heart with hope for the future,” she wrote.
As the women’s game grows stronger and women’s sport begins to get more coverage, the more threatened by it some men seem to feel and the louder they shout to try to bully it away.
The common refrain, of course, is that merely not liking women’s football does not make a man a misogynist and that is true. What does make a man a misogynist is reacting to anodyne comments about a women’s football match with the kind of ugly, frothing vitriol and mocking scorn they would never aim at a men’s football match, whatever the standard.
Take one example from cricket. My colleague Lawrence Booth sent out a link to a diving catch from Fran Wilson during England’s third and final ODI against West Indies at Chelmsford last week. His sole respondent suggested he was laughing out loud and added: “It’s a great catch but women’s cricket is pathetic and is really funny to watch. Cute you use it as weapon to enhance your reputation.”
There it is again, the idea that there must be some ulterior motive for admiring an element of women’s sport. Some male sports fans are so jaundiced about women’s sport they find it impossible to accept it has any merit. They feel so threatened by it that they shout and trill in the hope they can kill it.
Where does all this angst come from? Fear, I suppose. Like all prejudice. Our bastions of virility are being stormed one by one. Now that the women are even coming for our football, where else is there to run? Now that they can catch a cricket ball while flying through the air, where else is there to hide?
Anyway, please don’t get angry about this. You know I’m just saying it for effect, so why throw a hissy-fit? You know I don’t mean any of it, so why get yourself in a state? And when England and Japan play in Nice on Wednesday night, go and sit in the shed or put the bins out or have a bit of road rage. And leave everybody who loves sport in peace, so we can watch the game.