Fair play for women is still light years away
t Princes Park, deep in the gentrified Melbourne suburb of Carlton North, there was an occasion this month that fair boggled the mind. A British mind, at any rate. For this homely old ground, holding 22,000, was hosting a showpiece of such cachet that hundreds were shut out at the turnstiles in the Friday evening heat.
The occasion? A women’s Australian Rules match, between Carlton and Collingwood, which stirred passions so palpable that it merited a spot on prime-time television. For those who had long advocated an elite layer of female competition in the sport, it was scant surprise. When Australia first tested the waters in 2015, with an exhibition match, the game drew higher viewing figures than the men’s equivalent the night before.
All this offers a glimpse into a future that Britain struggles, despite every best endeavour, to envisage. Take football, as one front of a multi-faceted battle to place women’s sport on a fair and equal platform.
Since a World Cup that made stars, briefly, of England players Lucy Bronze and Laura Bassett – “fall in love with the Lionesses” was the cry – energies have switched to the domestic product. The efforts are laudable: the FA Women’s Cup final has switched to Wembley, while the Women’s Super League (WSL) is moving later this year to a winter season that brings it into line with other major European divisions.
But it is in attendances that one sees the scale of the quest for wider acceptance. Baroness Sue Campbell, chairman of UK Sport, discloses excitedly that crowds in the top tier of the WSL have grown by five per cent. Most encouraging, until you realise that such an increase equates to 52 people. That the average gate swelled from 1,076 in 2015 to 1,128 in 2016 is scarcely a feat to crow about. The more glaring truth is that even the best women’s match is watched by fewer people than the Ebbsfleet men’s team attracted to their contest last Saturday with Hungerford Town in the Vanarama South. At present tracking, parity with the Premier League can be expected in the autumn of 2683.
Progress is not so much piecemeal as glacial.
As such, the electricity around ‘This Girl Can’ should come with a significant caveat. This campaign, for anyone living in a Mongolian yurt of late, has proved as ingenious as it is ubiquitous. Depicting women in their workaday routines, with not a Photoshopped curve or a smouldering sideways glance in sight, it presents sport less as a realm of sweat and grime than as a source of exhilaration. And, to judge by the latest numbers, the message is resonating, with over 100 million hits for the TV advert and 2.8 million women attesting that they have done “some or more” physical activity as a consequence.
Statistics, though, have a habit of illustrating only what you want them to. ‘This Girl Can’ is aimed squarely at eradicating many women’s phobias about being judged
for dabbling freezing out Georgia, a country that has won six European Nations Cup titles in succession and whose domestic rugby has far greater depth than Italy’s. Feehan’s hostility is not even well-informed. Last year he claimed there was a “big gap between the bottom Six Nations side and the next-best team”. For the record, John, Italy are 14th in the world rankings, while Georgia are 12th. Your obstinacy does the sport you love a disservice. in sport, and by such a gauge it has succeeded emphatically. Hang-ups about squeezing into Lycra have been carefully disabused through slogans that include, “I jiggle, therefore I am.” Sporting neophytes tempted to give up at the first opportunity have been cleverly targeted on social media with encouragement to keep going.
But this change in attitudes represents only a partial victory. Set against the standards of the United States or Australia, toplevel women’s sport in Britain is dismally adrift in the boondocks. While in cricket, Ben Stokes and Tymal Mills rake in seven-figure payments for six weeks’ work in the Indian Premier League, the England women’s team cannot even afford business-class air fares. The standard defence, of course, is that it is the men who generate the interest and that it is they who should monopolise the perks. Market forces, old chap.
It is these very market forces that need changing. ‘This Girl Can’, which from today will be expanding its demographic to incorporate older women, might be a noble idea, but it is not bold enough. It cannot create the change it seeks unless a more enlightened mindset is coupled with the architecture of true equality. As it stands, the balance remains decidedly unequal: female presence on the boards of sport’s national governing bodies is 30 per cent, with the fraction of TV exposure granted to women’s sport a pitiful 10 per cent.
The bands of blazers who rule British sport need diversifying, fast. After the appointment this week of Cressida Dick as the first female commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, the position of FA chairman stands as one of the few in public life never held by a woman. It is symptomatic of a corrosive culture. Where the San Antonio Spurs, among basketball’s most decorated franchises, have seen fit to appoint Becky Hammon as assistant coach, women here are light years away from being given the same chance. The Premier League can barely cope with a female assistant referee.
‘This Girl Can’ is a powerful affirmation of women as outstanding sporting role models. But it needs to reach further if it is to be more than cosmetic branding. The spectacle of a packed Princes Park should be a salutary one for Britain. Where could you find such a crowd for a women’s sporting contest here, other than perhaps Centre Court at Wimbledon? Never mind ‘This Girl Can’, Australia is already at the stage of ‘This Girl Did’.
The stakes are far higher than body image alone. Until a women’s football match on these shores can draw the same packed house, there should be no margin for complacency.