 |
| Female player - black |
 |
| Male coach - white |
I wrote a letter to The Guardian last year, one which they actually published. It was a short caustic
note about how England had scored a hat trick of failures by being knocked out
in the first round of the last three world cups – at soccer, rugby and cricket. It later received a reply by a
woman who wrote to say that, actually, the female teams had done pretty well in
their world cups. Even if they had
not won, they had gone much farther in the competition that the men.
My instinct was to reply to this reproof that the female versions of
these sports don't really 'count'. Our national success – or humiliation – is measured by how well the men do and we
would be scraping the barrel to take consolation from the fact that the women
did better. A Neanderthal part of me
will always think that but I must admit that I have,
particularly since that riposte, been showing a closer interest in the female
game, although I have not yet gone to the trouble and expense of actually
paying to see a match, or even watching one all the way through on the
television.
Sport seems to play such an important role in our lives, I believe,
because it is such a masculine activity. Not
a male one, in the sense that women can take part as much as they like, but a
masculine one in that it reflects the codes held dear by men. Basically, a game
of rugby or soccer is twenty to thirty people dressing up in uniform and
kicking the sh!t out of each other for an hour and a half, then shaking hands
and jumping into the bath together, a quintessentially male activity. It's a substitute for war, that other masculine pursuit, as George Orwell
famously said. We still fight today but these are waged by highly-trained professionals killing or
wounding people they often cannot see. Soldiers are like professional sportsmen, paid to do a highly skilled job and maintain
the national honour. It is no
coincidence that there are such strong links between the military and the
sporting establishment, the Football Association going to great lengths to defy
the world footballing authority in their determination to ‘allow’ (oblige in
practice) players to wear the poppy on their shirts in defiance of FIFA’s no
political symbols rules.
The same FA has been in trouble recently over their hiring of a male
coach for the women’s team. Mark Sampson has since lost his job for
‘inappropriate behaviour’ in a previous role, whatever that is (probably
something sexual – although nobody has made any formal complaints against him).
Sansom may be the only coach to have been fired shortly after achieving a 6-0
victory and having lifted the team he managed to third in the world rankings,
but that is not enough nowadays. As well
as being a success you have to be a saint these days, as the last men’s soccer team
manager Sam Allardyce found out when he was unwisely frank about how it was
fairly easy to get around certain rules in a conversation which was secretly
recorded.
Sampson’s real crime was to fall out with Eniola Aluko, a striker who had
scored a lot of goals for club and country, but who did not take kindly to some comments he is alleged to have made about
Ebola and family members being arrested.
In the male game there might have been a row and it may or may not have
been patched up but the ethos there is that what goes on in the dressing room
stays in the dressing room and you do not complain in public about the boss –
or ‘gaffer’ as he is quaintly known – to the press. Aluko did not sign up to this respectful code
and complained about Sansom’s supposed comments, which she was expected to
dismiss as harmless banter. This was a classic tale of two cultures clashing - a predominantly white working class one in which you roll with the punches and a less respectful one in which you kick back against stereotyping.
I quite admire Aluko’s feistiness and wonder if our mediocre male team could do with a bit more of it. However, Sampson surely has to take some of the credit for moulding the team and bringing it more success than it enjoyed before under female coaches. Inevitably he has been replaced by a safe (and female) pair of hands but whether she brings the success he enjoyed is doubtful.
Brian Clough was acknowledged by virtually all male professionals as the
best manager in England, yet he was never given a crack at the England job
because he was not a diplomat. He might
have helped the players at his disposal to achieve their potential and exceed
expectations rather than constantly get an attack of the yips which makes
England such a frustrating team to support when it comes to international
football tournaments, male ones at any rate.
We live in an age when parity between men and women in the professions
is expected – if not always achieved – but this does not happen in sports
because men are as a rule stronger, faster and more skilled than women in most
disciplines, as well as being more battle hardened. The one exception to this, curiously, is
equestrianism, a very traditional sport with behaviour and dress codes which
enforce its establishment ethos. However,
men do not enjoy any advantages over women when it comes to getting a
four-legged beast to do their bidding. There is no distinction between men and
women in show-jumping simply because women do it just as well as men.
This is obviously not true in other sports. Serena Williams was miffed when John McEnroe,
who was promoting his book at the time, said that she would rank about 700 if
she played on the men’s tour, yet significantly she did not disagree with him
in factual terms, just asked him to respect her privacy (having recently
completed a phot shoot showing her naked and pregnant!). Most Englishmen take some comfort in the fact
that, even if their male national teams are rubbish, they would still beat the female ones. Some consolation - but not
much.
My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com Edwin Lerner
