Women's Football and a long trip down Shame Lane

I was watching sports the other day, there’s nothing unusual in that, it’s what happened when my brain started functioning after the long cop-out break it usually takes when watching muscly men running around in circles. All of a sudden I realised that I wasn’t watching football anymore, I was watching WOMEN’S FOOTBALL!

In some conspiratory way the TV station had thrown an allocation of sex quota in my face, and hence they lured me to get a dose of talent less oestrogen hormones in movement in between the real football. From being filled with manly men doing manly things on the field, my TV was taken over by skinny, square-shaped housewives and dykes running around like newborn calf’s, their hands swinging from side to side like transvestite homos on a breast prosthesis sale, something that didn’t really help their running around like drunken orientation runners without maps, missing the ball every chance they got. They weren’t that fast either. All of them could have been beaten by any old, drugged hag in an electrical wheelchair lacking electricity, but moving forward because of a slight slope in the field, and I started suspecting that the TV producers were really showing me a replay in slow motion.

It took me three minutes to remember where i put the remote control when panic finally struck me. What if someone caught me watching women’s footie? The rush of fear in my veins made my hands slippery with cold sweat, and dropping the remote, having to drop to my knees to pull it out from underneath the sofa, repositioning my finger to the correct button and actually pushing took too much time. I had no chance in hell to change the channel before my football crazed dad came walking into the room, and by then it was too late for any apologies. Whilst he broke down into an apoplectic seizure only broken up by slightly feminine whimps, I started to realise that I had disgraced my own flesh and blood, and there was no forgiveness for my sins.

Many women will call me a traitor, making fun of women’s football, but I’m a mere victim of my parents’ influence. I mean, I was raised believing that this is normal. The only real football is British Premier League for men, and as a woman, I can’t help but fall victim to the easy choice between watching manly men or sweaty women run around. My dad is a football fanatic who claims he was born on Boleyn Ground on the birthday of West Ham United’s former managers mothers aunt, and when he finally takes a dive, his ashes are to be spread over the field (West Ham supporters, you have been warned). All this has probably been like inspirational notes for “The Omen”, all signs leading to one thing: we’ve got a football fanatic on our hands.

From my childhood I have vivid memories of him filling his days with nostalgic football religious ceremonies whilst other people went to church. In the evenings he would play the supporter song over and over again, singing along with his husky, glass shattering whiskey grated voice. At parties, weddings and confirmations he wore his West Ham shirt with pride, and he actually married my mother in the middle of a football field. Personally I sort of fear the day he confesses that I was conceived on a football field too, although in some ways I already know it, but the pills make me forget. We’re all the same there, I like to think my parents only had sex three times, one for me and my two brothers, and preferably they were insanely drunk at the time, or better yet, my brothers were really the result of my mothers close relationship to that guy that shouts out the numbers at the local bingo. But I digress. My dad would read his private bible, the big book of football statistics and results in the Premier League, which sadly came out once a year, and we soon had to rebuild my parents bedroom to make room for them all...AFTER he threw my mother out, that is. The house was painted in appropriate colours of course, and the curtains in the living room were really shower curtains, because they were the only ones my mother could find that had bubbles on them.

Now I’ve always viewed my dad as slightly eccentric, maybe a tad footiepsychopathical, especially after that one time he removed my name from his will because I dropped the remote control during a West Ham match, hitting the floor made it change the channel just as West Ham scored (a rare occasion as we all know). Throwing him self over me in a wild panic to get the remote I caught a glimpse of his cold eyes, and knew that had I not been a girl, he would have skinned me alive. After that incident I’ve preferred to stay away at friends houses whenever West Ham play or there is some cup or league going on, making great effort to not wake the beast, until this unfortunate accident involving the women’s football came along.

For ages he refused to talk to me. He did once, when we were at a family dinner and I had tucked my skirt into my pantyhose coming out of the toilet, but he waited a couple of hours to point it out to me. At night I could hear him cry himself to sleep, playing his “I’m forever blowing bubbles”- record on repeat, or rewinding and replaying the video of the highlights from the 1966 world cup in between his manly sobs.

As time passes my dad’s disappointment will fade, but it will never disappear. He still hasn’t forgiven my older brother that one goal he let in as a keeper on the local junior team for seven year-olds. That’s actually my first memory from the football field, when my dad tried to strangle the referee and an armed football mum on the sideline, and later, he had a flashback to the olden days when he was a footballing menace, ran onto the field, shoved one of the seven year olds out of the way and gave the little keeper mental problems for life as he put his lights out with the ball when he couldn’t run out of the way fast enough on his tiny legs.

There may not be much you can do about people who see the face of Jesus in the grassy patterns of a football field, and at the age of 52 still scribbles “West Ham Rules” on loo walls in local bars, but I trust my mother to stop my dad when he tries to rename my younger brother Noble, but trust is a fragile bubble.