Women’s game can’t miss this opportunity to raise visibility ...but they have to engage more themselves
THE members of the Scotland women’s squad spent part of last week writing letters to their younger selves. It all got a bit cringe at times, to be perfectly honest with you. A bit too ‘dream big and aim for the stars’. You know, like drifting round the homeware section of a naff department store, reading the time-served platitudes on those wall plaques that urge you to dance like no one is watching or trust that love, laughter and Prosecco will make everything all right again.
So, let’s begin this week with a much earthier, much realer, message to these grown-up women of today — and their national association — as they endeavour to inspire the next generation, as they like to put it, by qualifying for the World Cup: Don’t make the same howling mess of all this as you did last time.
Scottish football had a gilt-edged opportunity to turbo-boost the female side of the game back in 2019 when playing in the finals in France. Even when they followed up two poor displays against England and Japan by bottling it against Argentina and throwing away a 3-0 lead in the last 16 minutes to wave goodbye to the knockout rounds, the optimum conditions for the great leap forward were still there.
If anything, the unmatchable drama of their 3-3 draw in that final group game — a retaken penalty, the original save by Lee Gibson overturned by VAR, in time added-on killing the dream — built a platform from which it seemed impossible to fail.
Yet, they did. And they are still failing. Noticeably.
A grand total of 6.1million people, a record UK audience for a women’s football game, watched the 2-1 loss to the English in Nice on the BBC. That costly draw with an ordinary Argentina, broadcast to a nation on tenterhooks on freeview telly, was also one of the most-requested matches of the entire tournament on digital channels.
In the immediate period after that game in Paris, everyone was talking about the incredible scenes that had unfolded. Everyone, it seemed, other than those actually involved. It just felt like the opportunity to grow the sport, establish the personalities of those players, tell the unique stories of that tournament, was permitted to drift and pass.
The Scottish FA banked a reported £400,000 from FIFA from the tournament. Interest and visibility was at an all-time high. Chief executive Ian Maxwell said it would be ‘transformational’.
Yet, that dough was allowed to gather dust. It took a year after qualifying for a ‘comprehensive review’ of the women’s game to even begin.
Four months after that meeting with Argentina, Glasgow City won their 13th straight domestic title with a 10-0 win in front of 100 folk on a wet Wednesday on a council-run ploughed field with no shelter and no way for disabled fans to access the action other than being lifted down a slope.
By then, any momentum had died. Head coach Shelley Kerr, inexplicably allowed to stay on and oversee a failed European Championship campaign, had admitted in a car-crash TV interview to having ‘a few drinks’ before a post-World Cup debrief that allegedly left players in tears.
Scotland reaching their first World Cup, no matter the actual results there, should have been something to celebrate and reflect upon. It was the one big reference point the casual observer, the potential future fan, had.
Instead, it felt like the elephant in the room. Like no one wanted to revisit it for fear of being asked about what actually happened in its chaotic aftermath.
Sportsmail tried to talk to Gibson, for example, to preview Glasgow City’s Champions League game with Russian side Chertanovo at the start of the following season. It was evident there was a deep fear of what happened with Kerr being raised — even though the intention was to focus more on the remarkable situation the goalkeeper, herself, had been at the centre of.
Glasgow City insisted the SFA would have to approve interviews. One call to Hampden made it clear Gibson wouldn’t be available — even though she hadn’t even been asked.
Mind you, more than three years on, it still seems easier to get an audience with the Pope than sit down with certain members of the women’s team.
Let’s not name names — not yet, anyway — but stories still filter through about players telling perfectly polite journalists not to contact them again and that they will only engage (or not) through their representatives, one agent asking what the ‘disturbance fee’ for their client picking up a phone would be and another refusing to pose with a sponsors’ logo because the company wasn’t ‘blue-chip’ enough.
One colleague tried to put together a piece on what the spin-off effect of England’s women winning the Euros in the summer might be for the game up here. He couldn’t get one player — not one — from the current Scotland squad to offer a view.
Where do they think they — and Scottish women’s football — are, exactly, in the food chain? More than 18,500 fans waved the national team off to the World Cup in 2019 at a Hampden friendly with Jamaica. For a big World Cup play-off win against Austria on Thursday, they got 10,182. And that’s before we even talk about how many were allowed in for free. It hardly points to progress.
The players, themselves, turning on the SFA’s attitude to the women’s game before the visit of Spain in April this year — albeit using a misguided tactic relating to ticket sales — confirmed there is still some way to travel.
We hear much about young girls not being able to be it if they can’t see it, but the attitude to promoting the game at international level seems questionable on many fronts, to say the least.
Women’s football in Scotland is not ready to grow exponentially through the domestic league. Not yet, anyway. It is the national side that can really raise the profile and drag things forward. Sports are constructed and marketed on the personalities involved, but what do we really know of the women who fly the flag?
There has been nice stuff on Emma Mukandi bringing her daughter to squad gatherings. Jen Beattie has spoken at length on being diagnosed with breast cancer. It’s getting there, but there could be so much more done in building profiles and relatability to wider audiences. The stories are undoubtedly there. It’s just that no one seems terribly keen on telling them after years of criticism over a lack of coverage and interest.
Even now, players talk about that 2019 World Cup as if its embarrassing and amateurish denouement and aftermath didn’t happen. It’s all about living the dream.
Thank heavens for Rachel Corsie, who seems a good captain. Back when Kerr was stonewalling all questions about her conduct in France in an appalling press conference before a Euro qualifier against Cyprus, Corsie, at least, revealed the head coach had held her hands up in a meeting with Maxwell and conceded ‘the healing process’ would take longer for some people than others.
Again this week, she spoke about the ‘difficult feelings’ France engendered and admitted our last World Cup wasn’t all about joy, fulfilment and pride the way it should have been. This is speaking with honesty. Letting people into what is really going on. And there needs to be a lot more of that around the women’s game from those in the inner sanctum to the commentators and observers who often seem to be preoccupied with cheerleading for their friends.
Even writing something vaguely critical of women’s football feels risky. Like you are pushing against the tide. There is an understanding the game needs support, but it needs to show it can stand on its own two feet and start attracting people through the doors as well.
Tuesday’s World Cup play-off against a perfectly-beatable Ireland — whether it assures qualification alone or results in another play-off further down the line — offers a second bite at the cherry.
Being involved in the finals in Australia and New Zealand next year would allow everyone to hit the reset button. To re-engage an audience that was permitted to slip off the hook three years ago.
However, these opportunities need to be taken and built upon. Beating Ireland is just the start. After that, it’s about showing lessons were learned from the shambles of 2019 — because women’s football simply can’t afford to miss an open goal like that again.