by Anna Kessel
I wish the same could be said for disabled supporters. A campaign to enable disabled sports fans to access stadia has been valiantly fought by Women in Football board member Joyce Cook for over a decade now. In 2014, seventeen Premier League clubs out of twenty did not provide an adequate number of spaces for wheelchairs, and there were reports of supporters having walking sticks and aids taken away from them on entering some grounds, and of families being separated into disabled and non-disabled areas. Can you imagine taking your disabled child to the football and being told you will not be able to sit together? Thankfully, Joyce, chair of Level Playing Field, went public with her frustrations and the Equality and Human Rights Commission took up the cause; meanwhile the issues were raised in parliament. The Premier League have now promised to comply with the Accessible Stadia Guide by 2017.
In spite of all the nonsense, women have been carving out their own space as fans for decades – from Rihanna tweeting about the World Cup, to Keira Knightley being interviewed about former Manchester United defender Gary Neville’s Sky Sports punditry. ‘He is just fucking amazing! Absolutely fucking amazing!’ says Keira, a West Ham fan who watches football on her laptop when she’s in Hollywood, and bought a TV especially so that she could watch games back in the UK. Then there’s Queen of Cakes Mary Berry, a huge Bath Rugby fan who likes to spend a Saturday afternoon down at the Rec, and Lily Allen who loves test cricket, and J. K. Rowling who seems to tweet about every sport going, from tennis at Wimbledon to the rugby World Cup. I wish we heard more about all these sport-loving celebrities. There’s endless pages of coverage about them on the red carpet, with glamorous outfits, or intense analysis of their fashion choices or their love lives, but hardly a word written about their interest in sport. Why not? How refreshing it would be to see a full-length interview with J. K. Rowling about sport on TV, or hear Mary Berry talk about wrapping up warm for games at the Rec, instead of speculative commentary on who she’s flirted with most on the Bake Off. If young girls could see the biggest female stars talking excitedly about sport it would have a huge knock-on effect on their own interest. It would recast glamorous celebrities as central to the sporting action, not simply gorgeous sidekicks to a potential sporting romance. Imagine if Keira was invited onto a sports quiz show, or interviewed as part of the coverage? Clare Balding does this to great effect in her horse racing coverage for Channel 4, where she walks around the racecourse bumping into celebrities and chatting with them about their race tips. I’d love to see more of that happening in mainstream sport.
Bestselling crime writer Val McDermid would make a great interviewee. Her father was a scout for Raith Rovers and discovered the legendary midfielder Jim Baxter, one of Scotland’s greatest-ever players. Val spent her formative years on the sidelines of muddy football pitches with her dad, watching miners and shipyard workers kicking lumps out of each other. ‘He used to take me with him to get me out from under my mum’s feet,’ she told me, laughing. ‘My dad would carry a plank of wood in the car so that in the wintertime we wouldn’t sink ankle-deep in the mud. We went to Stark’s Park occasionally too. The first memory I have is sitting on a railing, freezing cold in the winter, and then getting a hot pie and the gravy running down the inside of my sleeve, and thinking, “Ooh, that’s lovely.”’ Val chuckles. ‘They still do a good pie at Rovers. It’s a crucial part of football.’ I’m lost as she starts on about pies with macaroni cheese or baked beans. ‘Have you never had a bean and potato pie?’ she asks, incredulous. ‘You’ve not lived!’
Val liked watching the football, but more often than not she would end up entertaining herself – a fiction writer in the making. ‘When I was a kid being bored was a part of childhood, really. There was no expectation that children would be entertained every minute of the day. From a very early age I learned the exercise of imagination. I’d make up stories and amuse myself that way.’
When Val’s dad passed away aged sixty-four, Val was just thirty-two. The loss was immense, but there was one place in the world where Jim McDermid lived on, and that was Raith Rovers. Like Sex and the City actress Kim Cattrall, whose father was a passionate Liverpool supporter, forging a surprising but intimate connection between the Hollywood star and Anfield, Val was drawn closer to her dad through the club. And I don’t mean that in a sentimental way. Jim literally lives on through the club because Rovers fans won’t forget him. Every time they see Val they remind her of just how important her dad was to them.
‘As far as Kirkaldy is concerned, it doesn’t matter how many books I sell or how many prizes I win, I’ll always just be Jim McDermid’s lassie. There’s a very fine fish and chip shop in Kirkaldy called Valenti’s. I went in the other day and John Valenti was frying; he called over one of his staff and he said, “You support the Rovers don’t you?” and the woman said yes. And he said, “Well, this woman’s father discovered Jim Baxter!” Not: this woman’s an international bestselling lesbian cultural icon or anything like that,’ she laughs riotously. ‘Oh no, no. And so I’m very aware of coming back to a place where I was. There’s a saying in Scotland: “I kent her faither,” which means, “I knew her father.” It’s about keeping people connected to where they belong. For me it’s been very much a retying to my roots, I suppose.’
That reconnecting manifested itself in a literal way when Gordon Brown, a fellow Rovers fan, contacted Val to help drum up some sponsorship for the club. She ended up financing one of the stands . . . and the home kit. It must be the first professional football kit in history to have a woman’s name emblazoned across the front: ValMcDermid.com. The news went everywhere, and Val still sounds stunned that shirt sponsorship of a club in the Scottish Championship would receive worldwide attention. ‘I was on TV, in the newspapers, on the radio, I even had the New York Times on the phone asking about it. And I’ve really noticed the number of times I’ve been stopped in the street by middle-aged men since then, and they say, “I’m not a fan of your club but I think what you’re doing is great and I’ve started reading your books, by the way . . . !” so it works. It’s a win–win.’ But the link is more than a financial one. ‘It gives me a different place, a place where I’m judged by different criteria. I like the fact it gives me another world to be in. As a writer you’re always looking for material and that comes from a lot of places, and it does open that door to another world, a world I wouldn’t normally come into contact with in my life.’
It can be hard to explain quite what’s so special or meaningful about sport, but Val articulates it beautifully as she talks about why football takes such a central position in so many people’s lives. ‘I suppose if you can watch football and remain optimistic there’s a fair chance you can get through life and remain optimistic,’ she laughs. ‘Life is tough, and full of disappointments for people. Having a team that you can pin some hope on, and every Saturday at the home games you sit with the same bunch of people who share that optimism – and those moments of grief and despair – with you, there’s a real solidarity among the hardcore fans who come every week. We all need a place in our lives where we feel supported and where we feel a sense of solidarity.’
I ask Val if, as a lesbian and a rare example of a woman in the director’s box, she ever encounters hostility or a sense of not belonging in football. ‘I think because I walked through the door with a cheque in my hand they were very pleased to have me,’ she laughs. ‘The general view of our supporters can be summed up by saying, “You might be a lesbian, but you’re our lesbian.” No one’s ever said that, but that’s how it seems to me. A little while ago – it still cracks me up – I was at a home game and walking back to the south stand with the home end chanting, “You fat bastard!” at someone on the pitch. As I walked past, one of the guys caught my eye and he went, “It’s not you we’re talking about, Val.” I thought that was great!
‘I’ve actually never had homophobic abuse or any problem in the game. I have had occasions where I’ve been in the boardroom and another director has come in and spo
ken to the male director on my left and the male director on my right and his eyes have just slid over me as if I don’t exist, but I think that’s just to do with me being a woman and not anything else.’ She seems chuffed to bits that the fans find her approachable, and that she is in a position to make changes for them, even small ones. She roars with laughter at the memory of a woman who stopped her in the airport one day. ‘She said, “You’re Val McDermid, aren’t you? I go to the Rovers every Saturday I can manage, and can I tell you it’s a real disgrace there’s never any soap in the ladies’ toilets.” Well, I took this to the board and I said, “It’s a disgrace there’s no soap in the ladies’ toilets – something of which I was unaware.” And now we do have soap in the ladies’ toilets.’ Val beams. ‘These are wee things but they make a difference to people.’ Val hits the nail on the head. Soap in the ladies toilets does make a difference. It sends out a message that the experience of their female fans is of as much importance as that of their male fans. I bet that same woman was delighted, the next time she visited Stark’s Park, to find full soap dispensers in the ladies’.
Some of the best female football fans I have ever met are those who have gone to football for decades – from England World Cup glory in 1966, gritting their teeth through the hooligan years, and out again the other side, oblivious to what anyone else thought about the presence of females. Often they are stalwarts of their club, like non-league Kettering Town fans Anne and Molly, who run the club shop (proudly selling £3 ‘I scored at Rockingham Road’ knickers). ‘We’re like Hinge and Bracket, Anne and I,’ Molly told me, ‘the French and Saunders of non-league football.’32 Anne and Molly have been going to football since they were ‘old enough to look over the wall’, watching with fascination as Paul Gascoigne took over as manager for a media-frenzied thirty-nine-day spell. I enjoy their cheeky confidence, mocking their husbands’ timid affiliations with the Poppies. ‘My husband is a fan but I don’t let him come to matches,’ Anne told me. ‘When he does they lose dramatically, so he’s banned. He doesn’t mind being banned as long as he can watch the telly, because it’s usually cold anyway. They’re fair-weather supporters, aren’t they? We go all weathers, we do.’ I love how much fun the pair seem to have together, giggling their way through our interview, remembering the good times and the bad, with football a central part of their friendship that spans so many years. Then there’s the inimitable Esme Stokes, now in her eighties, who was married at half-time on her local football pitch, given a Sky Sports subscription for her sixtieth wedding anniversary, and does the teas and squash for the club: ‘I hammer on the door and say I’m coming in whether you’re in the shower or not.’ The very existence of these women challenges the notion that female fans in football – in sport – are a modern phenomenon. They are not. I only wish we made more of them, gave them a platform to become fan role models for younger generations of women and girls who might otherwise be put off.
I’d certainly love to know their view on a woman’s voice at the match. Or on the telly, in view of the furore when Jacqui Oatley became the first woman to commentate on English football’s iconic highlights programme, Match of the Day, in 2007. We probably should have seen it coming, after the Delia stuff, but I honestly didn’t. When I speak to Jacqui now, we laugh at our naivety. I’ll never forget her calling me up on a sunny spring day to tell me she’d been offered a TV game to commentate on, and me whooping like crazy on the other end of the phone. For her, the sexism angle was never more than a flicker of a thought, she recalls. ‘I do remember saying in passing to the Match of the Day editor ahead of my first game, “I wonder whether it will be picked up on . . .”’ We laugh riotously. ‘It sounds silly now, but I didn’t really think of it as being that big a deal from a gender perspective.’
One of the hardest facts for her to swallow, even now, is that so few people gave her credit for all the hard work she had put in to get the role, working her way up from hospital radio to a postgraduate degree in journalism and covering the non-league scene, standing at windy grounds without press boxes, doing commentary down a mobile phone. And then all the experience she gained at BBC 5 Live doing national commentary on the radio. One of the most hard-working, professional and conscientious people I have ever met in football, Jacqui takes football prep to anorak levels. I always looked forward to her radio commentaries, and her appointment made total sense to me. But a few days before her debut some joyless git decided to leak the information to the newspapers, and a national debate ensued.
‘Everything was fine until the Tuesday before the Saturday of the game and this little article appeared in the Daily Mail, a tiny snippet about me being the first woman to do Match of the Day. I remember thinking, “Oh no, it’s got out before the Saturday,” but even then I didn’t think it would get blown up to such an extent. On a flight back from Italy I was sat next to [BBC 5 Live presenter] Eleanor Oldroyd. I remember discussing it with her and my heart sinking. I sat there staring straight ahead thinking, “Oh jeez, I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a big deal.”’ The next day there was a full-page spread in the Daily Mail and a debate over whether women should be allowed to commentate on football matches. By Thursday it was front-page news in the Telegraph. ‘The Guardian had a big photo and a headline saying, “Is football ready for Jacqui Oatley?” I was thinking it’s 2007, wow. And anyway, what do you mean, is football ready? I’ve already been doing this job on radio for years.
‘On the Wednesday morning I remember waking up to my radio alarm clock, which is always set to 5 Live, and it was my good friend Rachel Burden reading the headlines. The top-of-the-hour item included a debate on whether a woman should be allowed to commentate on Match of the Day. I remember lying in bed thinking, “Oh my gosh, my own radio station, who I work for, is actually running a news piece on whether I should be allowed to commentate on Match of the Day?” I couldn’t believe it. I was absolutely astonished. I kept thinking: “But I work for you!” I was in the middle of this brewing storm and I felt very much on my own. It was a really strange feeling.’
Over the next few days Jacqui’s phone didn’t stop ringing. For a prep anorak, the constant interruptions were a nightmare. Plus there were all the other things to worry about. At one point, while she was on the phone to her mum in Wolverhampton, she heard a knock at the door. ‘My mum said, “Hang on, darling, the doorbell’s just gone,” and I overheard her politely declining whoever it was, and she came back on the line and said, “Oh sorry, darling, that was just the News of the World, they wanted some photos of you playing football as a child . . .”’ Meanwhile friends of Jacqui’s received phone calls from journalists asking for information. One tabloid wanted to know, ‘Is Jacqui a lesbian?’
The themes up for ‘discussion’ were prehistoric. Would a woman’s voice be suitable for the job? Former Wimbledon FC manager Dave Bassett was concerned for the reputation of football. ‘Maybe the BBC are trying to be innovative and groundbreaking, but I think it undermines the credibility of the programme and when she commentates at the weekend I will not be watching,’ said Dave. ‘I never really agreed that we should have women officials and I don’t think we should have female commentators. And my wife agrees.’
Cameron Carter, writing for football magazine When Saturday Comes, described Jacqui’s debut as akin to ‘the earnest trilling of a schoolboy competition winner’, before going on to say that ‘her summary of the game was, as you might expect, entirely satisfactory.’ He did note, however, the many complaints from online bloggers, including, ‘The male ear is not tuned to comfortable reception of the treble clef.’33 Which is a strange thing to say. Does the blogger mean that all female speech is uncomfortable for men to listen to? ‘It seems this country contains thousands of middle-aged men who hide, barely, a nervous physiological reaction to the sound of the female voice, Carter concluded. Damningly, even some of the women joined in – Julie Welch, herself a female pioneer as the first-ever female football reporter on a national newspaper, said that
Jacqui could only be successful ‘if she can make us forget she’s female’.
Is that what women in football have to be, then? Women in disguise as men? I think that’s a terrible indictment of our cultural attitudes towards women in male-dominated environments. When we look at fashion, no one says Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani should butt out of women’s clothing design, we just appreciate their work. Shouldn’t it be the same for women working in men’s sport? Jacqui’s addition to the Match of the Day line-up catapulted the show into the twenty-first century and promised so much for the future of match commentary, a craft often lambasted for being overly clichéd and stale. We swoon at the progress that Premier League football has made in the last twenty years – the speed of play, the skilfulness of the players, the overall fitness. Surely we want our match commentators to progress too?
One of the greatest innovations in modern football punditry has come through Gary Neville’s match footage analysis on Sky Sports. The level of detail he brings to his descriptions provides a fascinating insight. It’s a huge departure from the tired analysis we’ve had for years; Gary brings excitement, and a new way of doing things. One of my favourite TV moments of 2014 was watching him get out of his seat, pull up his suit trousers and pretend to be Liverpool goalkeeper Simon Mignolet, squatting close to the ground, acting out his hypothesis. As a reporter Jacqui has provided her own groundbreaking moments in football coverage. Her 2014 post-match interview with Arsène Wenger for Match of the Day is a great example of what she brings as a broadcaster. It was hailed as brilliant and courageous journalism, asking the probing questions that her colleagues rarely dare to ask of an established manager like Wenger, but unfortunately that didn’t stop her from being subjected to a torrent of abuse on social media. While the likes of Gary Lineker and Piers Morgan defended her, others let rip. But they were missing the point. Sport and sports coverage thrives off innovation, and the more we embrace it the better quality entertainment we will have. Sadly, for too many people, the fact that Jacqui is female remained an insurmountable obstacle to them ever opening their ears and listening to what she actually had to say.