Today Numerous Women Are Devoted And Knowledgeable Football Fans, But Until Recently That Was Not At All The Case

These days it isn’t unusual to see a group of women turning up at a football match and being absolutely as passionate and knowledgeable as the guys at the match, but this is a fairly recent development. Just a couple of decades ago, females were still in a small minority at matches and even then it seemed that many of them were just dragging along their man optimistic that he would reciprocate by going shopping with her the following weekend.

I became interested in football as a child, due to my friendship with my neighbour – a teenage lad whose passion for, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was amazing. It was down to him that I started to watch football on television (back then, this meant only Match Of The Day late on Saturday evening and the F.A. Cup Final annually). Even this little amount of viewing disturbed my parents, who considered it strange for a girl to enjoy sport, but I was a determined individual and my passion for the sport and my understanding of it grew in leaps and bounds.

By my mid-teens, this was a full-blown addiction. Pop stars, movie stars…the other girls could have them – my heroes were footballers. To this day I can remember waiting near the school hall, just about to take my German exam, and despite the fact that all the others were still desperately looking through the language course book, I was randomly flicking through a football magazine. (I didn’t pass the exam!)

Once I had finished at school and was financially independent, I wanted to go and experience football live. My parents were distressed at the very idea, so I turned to a family friend and his son, who was a little younger than me, to be my bodyguards. We went to quite a few matches near where we lived, taking in most of the London clubs and teams like Brighton (a top level club at the time). At one time, my father obviously decided that he should make an effort to try to build more of a bond with his daughter and accompanied us on a visit to Chelsea. My abiding memory of the afternoon was being embarrassed about the bad language from the people around us that my dad was having to be subjected to, and I never included him on our football trips again!

Once I had left home and transferred to a new area with my work, I quickly became friendly with a group of guys who were all football fanatics. When the World Cup was on television, all of us took it in turns to invite everyone to our houses to watch all the major matches. I can remember seeing one World Cup Final sitting halfway up an open plan staircase as one of my friends had welcomed so many buddies into his tiny terraced abode that it was virtually standing room only! With the state of my vision today, I’d most likely want binoculars or Laser eye surgery just to be able to see the screen now!

Anyway, there was a basic group of five of us, and because this was going back to the days when there were regularly matches on a Wednesday evening, we got into the habit of going to a midweek match when we’d finished work. in the south eastern corner of England gave us a large range of clubs to go and see, from the First Division (as the top division was called before the days of Sky’s influence) through to an adequate standard of non-league teams. It was hugely therapeutic to reach the middle of the working week in a not very pleasant job and then go to football and get rid of pent-up worries or anger by shouting at the referee and supporting the players. (I wonder why football chants have never progressed beyond questioning if the ref is blind? In this day and age, with such huge amounts of money and sponsorship involved, surely punters should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? To be honest, I’m surprised that the authorities haven’t already brought on board a sponsor who will give Laser eye treatment as part of the deal!)

As time passed, the members of our little group progressed to other occupations in other locations and the football trips died out, although I now and then went along to watch a local team with another friend who usually went on his own, and who was keen to have company every now and then. Even that arrangement came to a halt when he moved to another county, and I went back to watching football on TV just like I did years before. But somehow the over commercialisation and constant saturation coverage on satellite television, combined with the complete refusal to use Laser eye or similar technology to improve decision making, sadly made me come to loathe the game. I totally lost interest in it.

That is, until recently. A close female friend has never liked football, and having listened to me telling her many times that it is really different live to what is shown on television, she finally announced 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 sides to choose from and then I got the tickets. Knowing that she had no knowledge of the rules, I discreetly explained the referee’s decisions for her and showed her things that she might not have noticed. By the end of the match, she was desperate to see another match. And, on the occasions when time and money permit, we’ve been going ever since!