In The 21st Century Countless Women Are Serious And Knowledgeable Football Fans, But Until The Last Few Years That Was Definitely Not The Case
Saturday, May 7th, 2011These days it isn’t unusual to see a group of women going to a football match and being every bit as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as the guys at the match, but this is a fairly recent development. Only twenty years ago, women were still very much a minority at matches and even then it looked like most of them were simply tagging along their man optimistic that he would repay her by going shopping with her the following weekend.
I got into football whilst still in single figures, due to the enthusiasm of my neighbour – a teenage lad whose passion for, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was incredible. It was down to him that I started to watch football on television (back then, this was only Match Of The Day late on Saturday evening and the F.A. Cup Final every year). Even this small amount of viewing disturbed my parents, who thought it peculiar for a girl to enjoy sport, but I was a headstrong creature and my interest in the sport and my understanding of it grew quickly.
By the time I was in my teens, this was a full-blown obsession. Pop singers, movie stars…the other girls could keep them - my idols were footballers. To this day I can remember waiting near the school hall, ready to take my French exam, and despite the fact that everyone else was still frantically scanning through the language course book, I was casually flicking through a weekly football magazine. (I failed the exam!)
As soon as I had left school and had my own income, I wanted to go out and see some football live. My parents were horrified at the very notion, so I recruited a family friend and his son, who was a little younger than me, to be my bodyguards. We went to various matches around our area, including most of the London clubs and places like Brighton (a top level club at the time). At one point, my father for some reason decided that he should make an effort to try to build more of a bond with his daughter and travelled with us on a trip to Chelsea. My eternal memory of the afternoon was being embarrassed about the bad language from the fans around us that my dad was having to be subjected to, and I never took him on our football trips again!
When I left home and relocated to a new area with my job, I quickly got to know several guys who all loved football. When the World Cup started, three of us took it in turns to invite everyone to our houses to watch all the important matches. I can remember seeing one World Cup Final hanging halfway up an open plan staircase as one of the guys had welcomed so many folk into his little terraced house that it was virtually standing room only! With the state of my eyesight nowadays, I’d most likely require binoculars or Laser eye surgery just to be able to see the screen now!
So, there was a basic car full of five of us, and as this was in the era when there were usually matches on a Wednesday night, we got into the habit of going to a midweek match when we’d finished work. Residing in the south eastern corner of England gave us a large range of clubs to visit, from the First Division (as the top division was known before the days of Sky’s influence) through to a decent level of non-league teams. It was extremely therapeutic to arrive at halfway through the working week in an unpleasant job and then go to football and get rid of pent-up worries or anger by shouting at the referee and applauding the players. (I wonder why football chants have never developed from questioning if the ref is blind? In this decade, with such vast sums of money and sponsorship involved, surelythe fans should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? To be honest, I’m shocked that the decision makers haven’t already found a sponsor who will give Laser eye treatment as part of the arrangement!)
As time passed, the members of our little group progressed to other employment in other places and the football trips died out, although I sometimes turned up to watch a local team with another acquaintance who usually went on his own, and who was keen to have company every now and then. Even that arrangement came to a halt when he moved to another county, and I went back to watching football on TV just like I did years ago. But somehow the over commercialisation and constant saturation coverage on satellite television, as well as the blunt refusal to embrace Laser eye or similar technology to improve decision making, gradually made me come to dislike the game. I simply lost interest in it.
That is, until a couple of years ago. My closest female friend has always disliked football, and having listened to me telling her countless times that it is completely different live to what you see on television, she finally said that she would like to go to a match with me. I let her select what team she wanted to see, as she had two local league teams to choose from and then I got the tickets. Knowing that she had no knowledge of the rules, I discreetly detailed the referee’s decisions for her and showed her things that she might not have seen. By full time, she was totally keen to watch another game. And, as long as time and money permit, we’ve been going ever since!