Women fill Wembley to cap year of kicking down sport’s gender bar
|
Version 0 of 1. They came from all around the country, from Leek and Leamington, Durham and Deptford, part of a routine but undeniably significant moment of British sporting history at a sodden Wembley Stadium. In the event, perhaps the most important part of the England women’s football team’s first fixture at the rebuilt Wembley wasn’t the record 55,000 tickets sold, nor even the simple presence of women footballers, banned for 50 years from any professional ground, romping around the Football Association’s expensively reupholstered front room. It certainly wasn’t the result, either, as England were beaten 3-0 by a hard-running and technically superior Germany. The real triumph was simply that it stood, unapologetically, on its own merits as a sporting contest. It would be wrong to say that women’s football arrived at Wembley on Sunday afternoon: it has, after all, waxed and waned as an organised sport for more than a century. But this still felt like a moment of quietly assured coronation at the end of a year that might come to represent a watershed generally in the progress of women’s sport across the gender bar. The temptation will always be to compare the occasion here to the men’s game, and in this respect it seems heartening that the general view at Wembley was that England looked technically and tactically inferior, while Germany continued to stride away as clear favourites to win next year’s world cup. So no obvious differences there then. The atmosphere, though, was noticeably distinct from the strange sense of toxic congealment that tends to accompany a men’s international match. Only last Tuesday a section of the England support in Glasgow serenaded Celtic Park with 15 minutes of “Fuck the IRA”, while the enduring tone of England games, home or away, is a kind of flag-draped, doomed, manly defiance. As the teams came out at Wembley, however, the cheers around this sombre high-spec monolith of a super-stadium were celebratory as much as partisan. It was a genuine surprise to witness national anthems being applauded, opposition players going un-booed and first real rolling cheer of the afternoon reserved for the moment England’s players separated from their huddle for kick-off. With 30 seconds of the match gone, as if to make it quite clear what we were all really here for, England’s No 7 cut inside, took possession and smashed a wonderful dipping shot on to the bar. Wembley roared. The hooters blared. One small step in off the right wing for Jordan Nobbs. One giant leap for women’s sport. Not that England had much to cheer in a first half that saw Germany repeatedly pierce a brittle home defence and go to the break 3-0 up. And in many ways Germany are, as ever, something of a model here. The Frauen-Bundesliga is the most successful league in Europe. Participation levels are high. Even Germany’s manager, Silvia Neid, cut a brilliantly commanding – and stylish – figure on the Wembley touchline, directing her team with a stately sense of control while the England manager, Mark Sampson, fretted in his tracksuit. Beyond this match the hope, of course, is not that women’s sport is “having a moment”, but that it is making a decisive shift into the mainstream. It has been an encouraging year generally, developing the momentum and visibility given to women’s sport by the success of London 2012. The England women’s rugby team – now full-time professional athletes – won the world cup in France in August. The England women’s cricket team won the Ashes in Australia in January and later reached the final of the World Twenty20, confirming cricket’s status as an outstanding example of a high-quality, highly skilled televised product – not so much a women’s sport as simply a sport – further burnished by the award of professional women’s contracts by the England and Wales Cricket Board. Women’s cricket is currently flourishing at junior levels, with many girls playing in mixed teams up to adolescence. The real transformation may be just around the corner too, with rumours of a forthcoming women’s Indian Premier League, which would propel women’s cricket decisively into the firmament. At Wembley, as the minutes ticked down and England attacked with a familiar doomed sense of spirit in front of a crowd that cheered rather than chanted, with the occasional boo and even the odd “wanker” sign at a heated offside decision, there was time to reflect on another advantage women’s football has. For a start you can actually see it. England’s Wembley coming-out was live on the BBC, which will continue to screen matches for the next two years at least, a vital point of strength as women’s football seeks to convert the unsuspecting. At the end the crowd stood to applaud itself as the official attendance figure of 45,619 was announced, a flag day for a sport so brutally neglected as recently as the 1980s and 1990s that many of its records have simply disappeared. Half an hour after the final whistle England’s players were still out on the Wembley turf wandering around like explorers on the crust of Mars. It is to be hoped they will be back again soon. And that women’s sport generally will feel the wider benefits of a small but significant grappling hook across the divide. |