The sad culture that’s still stuck at heart of our sporting world
THE lads climbed the stairs to the small empty stand that stood next to the astroturf pitch and walked in a long line along the front row to the far end. A few sat down and plonked their cans of beer on the ledge in front of them. Others decided they would watch the game standing up.
There were about 15 of them. They were already in good spirits, if you get my euphemism. They had played their match earlier in the afternoon and now they wanted to have some fun. They shouted out words of encouragement to the women hockey players from their university who were warming up under the floodlights.
They were a particularly loud and doltish bunch and when the game began, they started to pepper their comments with sexual innuendo. ‘Spread it wide ,’ one of them shouted as their team attacked in the first half. Several of the lads nearly wet themselves with self-congratulatory hilarity.
Their ‘support’ continued throughout the game in a similar vein. Fearing, perhaps, that they had not yet drawn quite enough attention to themselves, one produced a ghetto blaster, which started pumping out a rap song with misogynistic lyrics.
The boys grew particularly animated when Robbie Williams’ song, Angels, came on. They belted out the line ‘ she offered me protection’ with exaggerated gusto and collapsed in stitches when one of them said he would rather go ‘bareback’.
Soon, the umpire, a dignified man who had been officiating the game superbly, walked over and asked them to turn the music off.
After the match, I spoke to the umpire for a little while and asked him if he came across this kind of behaviour often. He said he did. He said that it was not uncommon for men’s teams to stick around after t heir university matches to cheer on the women’s sides. He said that the ‘support’ often took the form of aiming crude insults at women on the opposing university team. He said there was even a protocol for dealing with that kind of abuse. If it became particularly bad, the captain of the side being ‘supported’ would be asked to call the abuse to a halt, the umpire said. If that failed to work, she would be cautioned or sent off. None of the students on either team seemed upset by the lads’ behaviour at the game I watched. They had been concentrating on the match. It was background noise, as far as they were concerned.
When the lads piled back on to their mini bus, a couple of the girls they had been ‘supporting’ popped their heads inside the door to thank them.
So maybe you’ll say that if only a few of the girls heard the ribaldry and if none of t h e m we r e particularly offended then where’s the problem? And maybe you’d be right. The lads certainly weren’t targeting individual players from the opposing side, in the way the umpire had witnessed in the past. They were just immature kids having a laugh.
The dispiriting part about it was that it was a brief snapshot of an English sporting culture where sexism and misogyny is still rife. I know this is pathetically naive but I t hought t hat in t he younger generation, in particular, that kind of attitude would be dying out. These were educated students, supposedly, and here they were behaving like a group of old boys who had seen a bit too much thigh.
None of this will come as a surprise to a lot of sportswomen. It is something they have always had to put up with. It seems more jarring now, which is a good thing, but you only need to look at social media if there is a discussion about women’s football to realise quite how much men in this country still seem to feel threatened by the idea of women playing sport.
Like those lads in the stand, they cannot watch women’s sport and support the team they have come to cheer in the same way they would if it were a men’s game. They have to t rivialise i t and demean it because they are too small and too limited to take it seriously. It remains, sadly, a prominent contour in the English sporting landscape.
But there is a postscript. Some of the women in the side I had gone to watch are only a few weeks into their first term at university and already they have forged a formidable team spirit. Already, sport is a cornerstone of their student existence. Already, it has helped them settle in. Some of them are sure they have found friends for life among their team-mates.
They are looking out for each other on and off the pitch. They are supporting each other. Which is what team sport teaches you to do. On the afternoon last week when I watched them play, they exuded strength and togetherness and happiness and purpose.
That is t he best message, I suppose. Misogyny is not cowing women any longer. It is empowering them. They are either ignoring it or bringing it down.
It is all that matters, really, not the pathetic, puerile, pubescent preening of a group of morons in a stand at a university sports ground who had neither the wit nor the maturity to know any better.