In The 21st Century Countless Women Are Serious And Knowledgeable Football Fans, But Until Recently That Was Not At All The Case
Today it’s normal to see a group of women turning up at a football match and being just as fanatical and knowledgeable as the guys at the match, but this is a comparatively recent development. Even if you go back just twenty years, females were still a small part of the crowd at matches and even then it appeared that most of them were had turned up with their man in the hope that he would repay her by going shopping with her the following weekend.
I got into football whilst at junior school, due to my friendship with my neighbour – a teenage boy whose love of, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was remarkable. With his encouragement I started to watch football on television (back in those days, this was only Match Of The Day late on Saturday night BBC and the F.A. Cup Final annually). Even this little amount of viewing disturbed my parents, who thought it peculiar for a girl to enjoy sport, but I was a strong-willed individual and my interest in the sport and my understanding of it grew rapidly.
By my mid-teens, this was a full-blown obsession. Pop bands, film stars…they were for the other girls – my pin-ups were footballers. To this day I can recollect sitting in a queue by the school hall, ready to take my French exam, and despite the fact that all the others were still frantically scanning through the language course book, I was casually flicking through a football magazine. (I failed the exam!)
As soon as I had left school and was earning my own money, I wanted to get out there and experience football live. My parents were horrified at the very idea, so I turned to a family friend and his son, who was a few months younger than me, to be my companions. We went to a number of matches near where we lived, including nearly all of the London clubs and teams like Brighton (a top flight club at the time). At one point, my father clearly decided that he should make an effort to try and bond with his daughter and went with us on a trip to Chelsea. My eternal memory of the match was being embarrassed about the bad language from the fans around us that my father was having to hear, and I never invited him on our football trips again!
Once I had left home and relocated to a new place with my work, I soon got friendly with 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 relevant matches. I can recollect viewing a World Cup Final hanging halfway up an open plan staircase as one of my friends had welcomed so many buddies into his small terraced property that it was virtually standing room only! With the state of my eyesight these days, I’d probably want binoculars or Laser eye surgery just to be able to see the screen now!
Anyway, there was a basic group of five of us, and since this was in the era when there were regularly matches on a Wednesday evening, we regularly went to a midweek match when we’d finished work. in the south eastern part of England gave us a wide choice of clubs to visit, from the First Division (as the top division was referred to before the days of Sky’s involvement) through to a reasonable standard of non-league teams. It was extremely therapeutic to reach the middle of 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 supporting the players. (I see football chants have never developed from the ref being asked if he is blind? In this decade, with so much money and sponsorship involved, surely punters should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? Actually, I’m shocked that the powers that be haven’t already signed up 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 jobs in other areas and the football trips stopped, although I now and then turned up to watch a local team with another mate who generally went on his own, and who was pleased to have company sometimes. Even that arrangement ceased when he moved to another county, and I returned to watching football on television just like I did years ago. However, the over commercialisation and constant saturation broadcasts on satellite television, together with the blunt refusal to embrace Laser eye or similar technology to improve decision making, soon made me come to dislike the game. I totally lost interest in it.
That is, until a couple of years ago. A good female friend has always disliked football, and having put up with me telling her many times that it is really different live to what you see on television, she finally announced that she would like to go to a match with me. I let her pick what team she wanted to see, as she had two local league clubs to choose from and then I got the tickets. Realising that she had no knowledge of the rules, I discreetly detailed the referee’s decisions for her and showed her things that she might have missed. By the end of the match, she was totally keen to see another match. And, as long as time and money permit, we’ve been turning up ever since!