These Days Numerous Women Are Devoted And Knowledgeable Football Fans, But Until The Last Few Years That Was Far From The Case

Today it isn’t unusual to see a crowd of women attending a football match and being every bit as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as the guys at the match, but this is a comparatively recent development. Just a couple of decades ago, women were still a small part of the crowd at matches and even then it looked like a lot of them were just dragging along their man optimistic that he would reciprocate by going shopping with her the next weekend.

I was introduced to football as a child, due to the influence of my neighbour – a teenage youth whose passion for, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was amazing. Because of him I started to watch football on television (that long ago, this meant only Match Of The Day late on Saturday night and the F.A. Cup Final once a year). Even this small amount of viewing disturbed my parents, who considered it strange for a girl to like sport, but I was a strong-willed person and my love of the sport and my understanding of it grew rapidly.

By my mid-teens, this was a full-blown obsession. Pop bands, film stars…the other girls could have them – my idols were footballers. Even now I can recollect waiting in a queue by the school hall, about to take my German 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 didn’t pass the exam!)

After I had left school and had my own income, I wanted to get out there and see some football live. My parents were distressed at the very notion, so I roped in a family friend and his son, who was a little younger than me, to be my bodyguards. We went to quite a few matches in our area, taking in most of the London clubs and places like Brighton (a top level club at the time). At one time, my dad for some reason decided that he should make an effort to try and bond with his daughter and went with us on a trip to Chelsea. My lasting memory of the day was being embarrassed about the expletives from the fans around us that my father was having to hear, and I never included him on our football trips again!

Once I had left home and relocated to a new town with my job, I rapidly became friendly with several guys who were all mad about football. When the World Cup was on television, three of us took it in turns to host a crowd of people in our houses to watch all the major matches. I can recollect seeing one World Cup Final hanging halfway up an open plan staircase as one of the guys had asked so many people into his tiny terraced property that it was just about 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 focus on the screen now!

However, there was a basic car full of five of us, and since this was back in the days when there were regularly matches on a Wednesday night, we often attended a midweek match straight from work. Living in the south eastern part of England gave us a wide selection of clubs to go and see, from the First Division (as the top division was called before the days of Sky’s involvement) through to a reasonable level of non-league teams. It was very therapeutic to get to halfway through the working week in a not very pleasant job and then go to football and clear out pent-up worries or anger by shouting at the referee and applauding the players. (I notice football chants have never progressed beyond the ref being asked if he is blind? In this day and age, with so much money and sponsorship involved, surelythe fans should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? In fact, I’m shocked that the decision makers haven’t already signed up a sponsor who will give Laser eye treatment as part of the deal!)

As time passed, the members of our little gang moved on to other occupations in other locations and the football trips stopped, although I sometimes went along to watch a local team with another friend 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 went back to watching football on television just like I had in the first place. However, the over commercialisation and constant saturation programmes on satellite television, together with the total refusal to make use of Laser eye or similar technology to help with decision making, sadly made me come to loathe the game. I simply lost interest in it.

That is, until a couple of years ago. A close female friend has always hated football, and having had me tell her numerous 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 decide what team she wanted to follow, as she had two nearby league clubs to choose from and then I got the tickets. Realising that she had no knowledge of the rules, I discreetly outlined the referee’s decisions for her and showed her things that she might not have seen. By full time, she was totally keen to go again. And, as long as time and money permit, we’ve been turning up ever since!