Get Her Off the Pitch! by Lynne Truss

Author:Lynne Truss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Obviously sport is a macho world full of sexist attitudes, and anyone reporting on it needs to be one of the lads - for protective colouring, if nothing else. I mean, if Sir Alex Ferguson condescended to tell you that cunt joke, you’d be well advised to find it amusing. All I wonder is: are there any exclusively male reporting qualities that can fully account for men’s complete - and continuing - dominance of this profession? I don’t see how that can be possible. Oh well. An interesting sidelong perspective on all this was offered to me in Paris during the World Cup in 1998, when I met a be-scarfed woman football writer from Alexandria. I was as taken aback as anyone to see her accredited at the Stade de France - and slightly miffed that I was, outrageously, obliged for once to share my handsomely accoutred (and brand new) female toilet facilities. Anyway, she told me that in fact her newspaper in Egypt had sent an entirely female reporting team to the World Cup - and the reason was straightforward enough. They didn’t trust the men not to get too involved.

Evidently there is research to show that watching football increases testosterone levels. And I’m highly inclined to believe it: the first time I read about this research, it was during a lengthy football tournament and - honest to God - I had just been staring into space, pondering the question ‘I wonder how a carburettor works?’ So maybe exposure to football will make us all hairy-knuckled and gravel-voiced in the end, and the problem of being a woman in a man’s world will conveniently disappear. What has been fascinating in the past ten years is to see how, imagewise, the world of sport is every day tailored to a more politically correct inclusion of women. Broadcasting now has some terrific women sports presenters - although, controversially, a resistance to women football commentators. Match of the Day cameramen seem to have stopped picking out attractive women in the crowd, but you could see why they used to do it. First, it provided pleasant eye-candy for the viewers; and second, it gave the interesting (if misleading) impression that footie support was pretty evenly spread across the genders. I was once invited to watch Match of the Day being prepared and broadcast from the studio, and saw the highlights editors busily inserting shots of small boys with packets of crisps to signify half time, small boys eating pies, and so on. From their Highfield Road footage that day they had a Coventry-West Ham game with the ultimate Saturday-afternoon gift: a stocky young bride arriving in the stands, in white, straight from the church, completing her nuptial outfit with a Coventry scarf. Was this the ‘something blue’ she had chosen to wear to the ceremony itself ? You couldn’t rule it out. The chaps even had a later shot of her in the crowd lighting a half-time Rothmans; but big-heartedly, they decided not to use it.

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