Another own goal, and Wags are gone
It’s the end of an era as Coleen-Rebekah battle wraps up, says Judith Woods
They think it’s all over. It is now. When Kenneth Wolstenholme uttered those immortal words back in 1966 to scenes of untrammeled joy as England won the World Cup, football was the real winner.
As the final whistle blew at the High Court this week on Rebekah Vardy versus Coleen Rooney there was no jubilation. No Chanel sweaters pulled up over heads. Just a sense of finality as this unedifying she-saidshe-said battle — over the source of various leaks to the media following a “sting operation” by Rooney — marked a cataclysmic end to the Age of the Wags.
The verdict will be announced in due course. But whether you class the $5.9 million grudge match as a bang or a whimper, this monstrously selfindulgent libel case is essentially a 21st-century iteration of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.
Unlike the triceratops, the Wags’ rule lasted just 16 years. But rather like those hair extensions, in the public imagination it seemed much longer.
It began in Baden-Baden, 2006. I remember Victoria Beckham leading her Wag crew through the sleepy pedestrianised spa town like a reenactment of Reservoir Dogs styled by Dolce & Gabbana.
Sorry if it sounds a bit lame now, but back then it was a glamazonian parade the likes of which we had never before witnessed. You even saw Coleen strategically tucked behind superstar Victoria in the stands; exactly the same look-at-me, status-by-association power move Rebekah was accused of pulling.
The headlines, the rumours, the myths were nothing short of Ab Fab — Victoria Beckham supposedly bringing 60 pairs of sunglasses with her, bottles of Veuve Clicquot drunk through straws, the $111,000 hourlong shopping trip and wild karaoke nights.
It was all a far cry from 1966, when the England squad’s only contact with their wives during the tournament was a joint outing to the shops in Golders Green. Bless.
While Tina Moore, Norma Charlton and Judith Hurst passed by unnoticed on their eve-of-the-final theatre trip to The Black And White Minstrel Show (yes, really), their 2006 counterparts had their every pout recorded by OK!, Closer, Heat and Hello.
Before the Wags even touched down in Germany, they were channelling the best of Footballers’ Wives when Elen Rives missed her flight after trying to board with five large pieces of hand luggage.
Didn’t they know who she was? They sure did once she leaped on a nightclub table and belted out I Will Survive.
Inevitably, the Wags got the blame for England’s World Cup failure that year. “It was a bit of a circus,” defender Rio Ferdinand ruefully observed in 2008. “People were worrying more about what people were wearing or where people were going than the England football team.”
Initially the Wives and Girlfriends’ Faustian pact with the redtops was a mutually beneficial relationship.
The term ‘Wag’ became shorthand for working-class aspiration and achievement; what young woman didn’t dream of days spent shopping and lunching, late-night Champagne and, of course, standing by her man? All in vertiginous heels.
It’s impossible not to squirm at the overt sexism baked into the very term. Just last year singer Frankie Bridge denounced it as a form of disparagement. Bridge, who found fame in girl group The Saturdays long before she met Wayne, 40, admitted she found it difficult suddenly being labelled a Wag.
“I found it really frustrating because I’d think to myself ‘I’ve worked for years in the public eye, they know I have my own career. And even if I didn’t, why am I now just this thing because I am married to someone who plays a sport? It is used as a derogatory term.”
Her point is ably illustrated by the fact that current England captain Harry Kane’s wife, Katie Goodland, is a sports science graduate. Harry Maguire’s wife, Fern Hawkins, is a physiotherapist with a first-class degree and Raheem Sterling’s girlfriend, Paige Milian, has a property empire and an accountancy qualification.
There’s more: Reece James’ partner Mia-Florence McClenaghan has a law degree and Ashleigh Behan, girlfriend of Kalvin Phillips, is a university graduate turned established make-up artist.
I think we can all agree that Wags is a dated, reductive way to refer to these women, who are conspicuously successful in their own right.
When this generation of wives and girlfriends post pictures on social
It’s impossible not to squirm at the overt sexism baked into the very term
media, they are more likely to be in gym wear, drinking green juice than knocking back vodka and Red Bull behind VIP ropes. They are the future.
And so we turn back to the empty High Court, echoing with the sounds of Coleen and Rebekah, husbands in tow, dragging one another’s reputation through the mud.
Although say what you like about Rebekah Vardy (actually, on second thoughts don’t, you’ll end up on the stand) she managed to trash her own reputation so comprehensively that it was often difficult to believe she was the litigant rather than the accused.
We were enthralled, amused, entertained. But Wagatha Christie is no more. We will not see their like again. I hope. Wag RIP.