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.

Tales of Terror - I've become my dad

All kids go through a faze where they decide to never be like their parents. They make a heartfelt sworn promise over their Nintendo-consoles that they will never learn to appreciate mom-pants, prunes or Tom Petty. I used to be one of those kids, until today. It all suddenly dawned on me that I’ve become just like my father. That which was not meant to happen, has indeed happened, and the process of becoming like him has had quite a lot of time to sneak up on my sub consciousness. All at once I became aware of the similarities that had been increasing rapidly for months (NB: all sport haters are advised to leave the premises, this is painful to read).

1: After having poured myself a glass of milk from a milk carton, I simply FORGOT to put the milk carton back into the fridge.

For you this may be as normal as having your 27th- birthday party at a nude roller disco, but what you need to understand is that my dad is the kind of person who buys food, comes home and just puts the bags of food on the kitchen counter. He then leaves the kitchen to go watch some football or read the paper, twice, just in case he missed something, and these are activities that may take whole days to finish. Be it ice cream, milk, cheese or frozen meat, that food is dead and buried unless I just happen to stroll into the kitchen by accident (yeah right, we all know a woman only enters the kitchen for one thing, and she never leaves unsatisfied). One thing that he never forgets to put in the fridge though, is the BEER. Bless his manly heart. Ugh, ugh.

2: During the last football match with my local team SK Brann (don’t sit there looking stupid, look it up and love them), in which Brann naturally had the favour of the gods and brutally slaughtered their opponent, my two brothers, my dad and I were discussing the match. There’s nothing odd about that, you say, and no, there wasn’t, until I said something I shouldn’t, or shouldn’t have been able to say. Complaining about shitty defence players, I used the word “backroom”, a very footballey term in Norwegian, that just sort of popped out of my mouth. Now, to put things straight, I don’t know football terms, I merely watch and enjoy, I’m a woman for Christ’s sake! If I ever had anything to say about “backrooms”, I’d call them “the side of the football field where the keeper is”. So for something like this to have entered, or more like exited my mouth in front of such an audience, is almost on the verge of a scandal. All of a sudden I found myself at the centre of attention, and in my dad’s shady eyes I could see the spark of fatherly love begin to grow to new heights. This far surpassed any A I ever got on a test, any boyfriend I dumped because my dad didn’t like the way that boy pronounced Bob Dylan’s name and even that bottle of gin I got him for his birthday when everyone else got him socks, this was LOVE, the sporty kind.

I immediately had to leave the room, running to the bathroom to splash water on my face and cry in the shower to the sounds of German acid techno, over and over again I checked my reflection in the mirror to see if I could still recognise myself, and to some extent I did, when I turned slightly to one side and pouted my lips.

To understand my reaction to this, you need to know that for years and years and even more years (bloody hell, I’m not THAT old!), my dad has lavished tons of football facts, results and quotes on my brothers and me, and we all just sort of turned a blind ear and went on with our crayons or insect torture, thinking nothing of it. It was just sports, right?! I’ve always thought that my brothers and I were immune to this cruelty called “love of sports” and our dads constant “voice of God” from the corner of the room, until now. Now I realise we’re all fucked.

3: The other night I was casually typing away at my keyboard in some sort of brain dead inner monologue in front of my computer, when I all of a sudden had this shooting pain in my thigh. It was like an old grenade injury from the Vietnam war acting up on the nerves in my thigh, and whilst I was sitting there hugging my leg, and the faded memories of my fallen mates from the battle of Quangwhothefuckcares flashed before my eyes, it dawned on me once again that I had yet another dad-syndrome. The old war wounds from the time my dad was in the navy and there ALMOST (not really at all, just pretend) broke out a conflict between Norway and Russia when they discovered a secret Russian submarine in the Oslofjord and had to kindly escort it out of there (secretly hoping the Russians would at least leave behind some floaters of vodka). You know, that injury he got from standing on deck waiting for orders, staring at the calm sea, yes, exactly, that brutal one right there. Not to mention what he got from the Korean War, even though he was born in 1954.

Other times it’s his old top athlete-injuries that act up on him when he’s casually lounging in his TV-chair. Some of the classics are “the thigh pull”, “the ankle snap” and “the back pain”, which all just magically appear whenever there are dishes to be done. You just watch, next I’ll be blogging about my time in the Boa war.

4: Even though I’ve not been able to stand peanuts at all my entire life, lately they’ve started to taste heavenly to me. We’re talking about a kind of food that has been my dad’s life source and snack ration for 50 years. Any time of day, any occasion calls for a peanut or ten. In this house, peanuts are as healthy as vegetables and fish, and it can cure anything from a mild headache to AIDS.

5: A Thursday night when my dad and I were watching some meaningless program on TV, up popped a couple of teenagers to answer the reporters silly questions about material values or something. The teens were of the kind that you see hanging on a street corner with an S-shaped posture, saggy trousers, gigantic headphones, shrieking mobile phones on a leash and a coke bottle glued to their spotty lips (don’t ask me how lips can be spotty, too many bad memories), so naturally I couldn’t suppress a comment about what a waste of space those teens were, hearing their answers about how they couldn’t live without their i-pods and that their parents were dumb. I think it went something like “kids today, have they no shame?”, and in an instant I could feel my dads cold stare at me from the side. Ice filled my veins as I slowly turned my head to meet his gaze, there was that little smile at the corner of his mouth, and the love spark in his eyes again and there was no turning back. Sobbing, I broke down right there in the living room, realising that nothing says more about the loss of youthful spontaneity and old age than criticizing the younger generations.

Tomb, sweet tomb, here I come. I might as well join a football supporter club and learn to enjoy the fine cuisine of hot dogs and beer, and the literary genius that is the sports section of the newspaper. Bring in the clones, thank you and goodnight!