Today it isn’t unusual to see a crowd of women going to a football match and being absolutely as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as the guys at the match, but this is a comparatively recent development. Only twenty years ago, females were still very much a minority at matches and even then it seemed that a lot of them were had turned up with their man hoping that he would return the favour by going shopping with her at the weekend.
I was introduced to football as a child, due to the influence of my neighbour – a teenage lad 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 and the F.A. Cup Final annually). Even this small amount of viewing concerned my parents, who thought it peculiar for a girl to like sport, but I was a determined person and my love of the sport and my understanding of it grew in leaps and bounds.
By my mid-teens, this was a full-blown addiction. Pop singers, film stars…they were for the other girls - my pin-ups were footballers. Even now I can recollect hanging about in a queue by the school hall, about to take my French exam, and whilst all the others were still frantically flicking through the language course book, I was nonchalantly flicking through a copy of football magazine. (I failed the exam!)
Once I had finished at school and was financially independent, I wanted to go out and see some football live. My parents were horrified at the very thought, so I roped in a family friend and his son, who was a couple of years younger than me, to be my bodyguards. The three of us went to quite a few matches around our area, taking in most of the London clubs and clubs like Brighton (a top level club at the time). At one time, my dad obviously decided that he should make an effort to try to build more of a bond with his daughter and travelled with us on an excursion to Chelsea. My lasting memory of the afternoon was being embarrassed about the bad language from the fans around us that my father was having to listen to, and I never included him on our football trips again!
Having left home and relocated to a new town with my work, I rapidly became friendly with a number of guys who were all mad about football. When the World Cup started, four of us took it in turns to invite everyone to our houses to watch all the important matches. I can recollect watching one World Cup Final perched halfway up an open plan staircase as one of the guys had invited so many folk into his little terraced house that it was practically standing room only! With the state of my vision today, I’d probably want binoculars or Laser eye surgery just to be able to focus on the screen now!
However, there was a basic car full of five of us, and as this was going back to the days when there were regularly matches on a Wednesday night, we got into the habit of going to a midweek match when we’d finished work. Living in the south eastern area of England gave us a large choice of clubs to go and see, from the First Division (as the top division was referred to before the days of Sky’s involvement) through to an adequate standard of non-league teams. It was hugely therapeutic to arrive at halfway through the working week in an unpleasant job and then stand on the terraces and get rid of pent-up anxiety or annoyance by shouting at the referee and supporting the players. (I notice football chants have never moved on from questioning if the ref is blind? In this day and age, with such huge amounts of money and sponsorship involved, surelysupporters should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? To be honest, I’m shocked that the powers that be haven’t already found a sponsor who will provide Laser eye treatment as part of the arrangement!)
the years passed, the members of our little group moved on to other jobs in other places and the football trips stopped, although I now and then turned up to watch a local team with another friend who generally went on his own, and who was happy to have company sometimes. Even that arrangement came to a halt when he moved to the north of England, and I went back to watching football on TV just as I had years before. But somehow the over commercialisation and endless saturation broadcasts on satellite television, as well as the total refusal to make use of Laser eye or similar technology to improve decision making, soon made me come to dislike the game. I completely lost interest in it.
That is, until a couple of years ago. My closest female friend has always hated football, and having put up with me telling her countless times that it is totally different live to how it is depicted 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 nearby league clubs to choose from and then I got the tickets. Knowing that she had no knowledge of the rules, I quietly explained the referee’s decisions for her and showed her things that she might have missed. By full time, she was desperate to watch another game. And, on the occasions when time and money permit, we’ve been attending ever since!
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