Today it’s normal to see a crowd of women attending a football match and being absolutely as fanatical and knowledgeable as the men at the match, but this is a comparatively recent development. Just a couple of decades ago, women were still in a small minority at matches and even then it appeared that most of them were had turned up with their man in the hope that he would reciprocate by going shopping with her at the weekend.
I became interested in football as a child, due to the influence of my neighbour – a teenage youth whose love of, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was incredible. Because of him 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 once a year). Even this little amount of viewing concerned my parents, who thought it peculiar for a girl to like sport, but I was a strong-willed person and my interest in the sport and my understanding of it grew rapidly.
By the time I was in my teens, this was a full-blown obsession. Pop singers, actors…the other girls could have them - my heroes were footballers. To this day I can recall sitting near the school hall, just about to take my Spanish exam, and despite the fact that all the others were still quickly flicking through the language course book, I was nonchalantly flicking through a football magazine. (I didn’t pass the exam!)
Once I had left school and was earning my own money, I wanted to get out there and see some football live. My parents were horrified at the very thought, so I turned to a family friend and his son, who was a couple of years younger than me, to be my chaperones. The three of us went to a number of matches near where we lived, visiting most of the London clubs and places like Brighton (a top division club at the time). At one point, my dad 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 swearing from the fans around us that my dad was having to listen to, and I never invited him on our football trips again!
When I left home and transferred to a new town with my job, I quickly got to know several guys who all loved football. When the World Cup started, all of us took it in turns to have a crowd round to our houses to watch all the relevant matches. I can recall viewing a World Cup Final sitting halfway up an open plan staircase as one of the guys had welcomed so many buddies into his small terraced property that it was practically standing room only! With the state of my eyesight nowadays, I’d very possibly 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 since this was in the era when there were usually matches on a Wednesday evening, we regularly went to a midweek match after work. Residing in the south eastern area of England gave us a wide range of clubs to watch, 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 hugely 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 see football chants have never progressed beyond asking if the ref needs glasses? In this decade, with so much 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 signed up a sponsor who will fund Laser eye treatment as part of the contract!)
the years passed, the members of our little gang moved on to other jobs in other locations and the football trips stopped, although I occasionally tagged along to watch a local team with another acquaintance who generally went on his own, and who was pleased to have company sometimes. Even that arrangement ceased when he moved to the north of England, and I reverted to watching football on television just like I had years before. But the over commercialisation and constant saturation programmes on satellite television, combined with the total refusal to use Laser eye or similar technology to assist decision making, soon made me come to loathe the game. I totally lost interest in it.
That is, until recently. A close female friend has always disliked football, and having put up with me telling her numerous times that it is really different live to what is shown on television, she finally decided that she would like to attend a match with me. I let her pick what team she wanted to support, as she had two local league teams to choose from and then I got the tickets. Understanding that she had no knowledge of the rules, I quietly detailed the referee’s decisions for her and showed her things that she might have missed. By full time, she was totally keen to see another match. And, on the occasions when time and money permit, we’ve been going ever since!
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