Watsonworks

WATSONWORKSBLOG Number 5

IN PRAISE OF WOMEN’S
SOCCER
And some little-known facts

In researching for my novel Fair Game: The

Steps of Odessa (Spire Publishing, ISBN 1-
897312-72-5), linking the tribulations of
women’s soccer with human rights abuses in
Ukraine, I was startled to discover that once
upon a time in Britain women’s soccer was all
the rage and drew prodigious crowds. There
were even professional women players.

At Goodison Park, Everton, in 1921, Dick

Kerr’s Ladies FC attracted a crowd of over 50,000. On 5 December in the same
year – cataclysm: the Football Association (all male, of course) suddenly put
women’s soccer to sleep for a generation, banning women from playing on FA-
affiliated grounds; their explanation, that ‘the game of football is quite
unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged’.

Doldrum decades
In a Guardian article, ‘When women ruled the pitch’ (10 September 2009),
Anna Kessel writes, ‘It is hard not to suspect this was, at least in part, a
defensive move made by male officials who felt threatened by the success of
their female counterparts’.
She goes on, ‘And so the women’s game was allowed to wither on the vine,
missing out on half a century of development while the men’s leagues
established even stronger roots’.
Though the ban was suspended in 1971, women’s soccer has continued to be
one of the cinderellas of British sport, inadequately funded, largely neglected
by the media; yet guess what? Statistics indicate that football is the premier
sporting interest of women and girls.
Take a closer look at the sporting scene and you discover that women’s soccer
has not only advanced in public interest, the FA has worked to remedy its ban
and its neglect.
As Anna Kessel points out, if the FA ‘is culpable for invoking that highly
damaging ban in 1921, it has, since assuming responsibility for the women’s
game in 1993, made significant inroads and investment into promoting it’.

The extent of women’s soccer in the UK is startling. A survey conducted in 2008

identified 1600 women’s teams in England, while girls’ teams numbered 4,800,
a doubling of the number in the previous year. The FA Women’s Club Directory
cites over 30 prime status clubs, from Arsenal to the Bristol Academy, from the
Lincoln Ladies to the Millwall Lionesses.

In addition there are more than 30 Centres of Excellence operating in the

major cities but also in towns such as Milton Keynes and Northampton, and
areas such as north Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Somerset.
Predictably America leads the way in women’s soccer, at least in terms of cash
and enterprise. Cyberspace is abuzz with footballing websites such as Soccer
America (w.soccerameerica.com), Women’s Soccer World (womensoccer.com)
and in the UK, When Saturday Comes (wsc.co.uk).

Quality on the pitch

Anyone who watched England’s impressive performance in the Euro final
against Germany in September would confirm that women’s soccer is ready to
compete, for skill, tactics, speed and commitment at the highest level.
True, the German team beat England convincingly, but they are a squad – and
have been for many years – that have proved pretty well invincible,
characterised in their play by vision, pace and finishing power that matches
anything to be seen in the men’s game. However, when it comes to
remuneration, an England player earns in a year what an average male player
in the football league earns in a week.
The England women’s team, under their manager Hope Powell, goes from
strength to strength, but back in the sticks clubs face penury and in some cases
– like Bristol City and Fulham Ladies – closure.

Gender fixation
The obstacles to the progress of women’s soccer are as much cultural as
financial, each tending to undermine the other. By tradition, football has been
regarded as a sport for men. Hockey and lacrosse are still the sports of choice
for girls in secondary education.
The editor of a publishing firm I submitted Fair Game to was of the opinion
that, surely, if the subject was football, the book should be aimed at boy
readers; thus casting a woman footballer as the key protagonist of the story
was simply to have mixed my genders if not my metaphors. This response to a
work of fiction matched stereotypical thinking about women’s soccer in the
real world.
In Fair Game Natasha’s aspirations to play soccer for her country are frustrated
not by lack of ability or determination, but by factors beyond her control, and
chiefly off the pitch.
Of course gender remains a crucial feature in the narrative but aligned with it
is the sense that football mirrors and encompasses the struggles of life itself,
the challenges, the disappointments, the joy, the let-downs, not to mention
the bruises, the sprained ankles and the slagging off, in reality as much a part
of the women’s game as of the men’s.

The price of free speech

The decision to set the novel in Ukraine was influenced by that country’s
human rights record: it was ranked in 2004 by Reporters Without Borders as
second only to Columbia as the most dangerous country for journalists,
notorious for the beatings up in stairwells of editors, photographers and
reporters; and the murder in 2000 of Georgi Gongadze, an online correspondent
whose delving into state corruption was leading him to the heart of
government.
Ukraine’s is an amazing history – occupied by foreign invaders over centuries,
subject to Stalinist tyranny during the 1930s only to be savagely overrun by the
Nazi war machine during the 2nd World War.
It is a country ‘of which we know little’ but it deserves better in its struggle to
emerge from the shadow of Soviet rule and Iron Curtain mentality.

Search for identity

Among the key tasks of fiction writers is the shaping of the identities of their
characters within the contexts that surround them. Those contexts too may be
in search of identity. As a nation, Ukraine has been described as a ‘land
without borders’, in the post-Soviet era, a country struggling to define itself.
Yet one of Ukraine’s most positive identifiers is its record as a footballing
nation, typified by Shakhtar Donetsk or, most famously, Dynamo Kyiv. Here
again, however, tragedy is likely to be the spectre in the wings. Dynamo’s
website records a tournament which took place in the city during the German
occupation.
Professional teams from Hungary and Germany were ferried in by the Nazis
with a view to demonstrating that they were as superior with the football as
with the gun. Probably believing that for once they were being granted an even
playing field, Dynamo beat their German opposition.
They were not to be feted or forgiven: the winning side was arrested and duly
despatched to a concentration camp where several were executed.
Of course in the 21st century Natasha and the Under 19s Ukraine women’s
squad do not have to face that kind of horror; but the obstacles to achieving
fair play as contrasted with the cynicism and malice of fair game, are real and
formidable. They demand great resolution, courage and – yes, teamwork, to
overcome them. Women footballers in Britain might well say Amen to that.

Recommended reading
Beheaded: The Killing of a Journalist by J.V. Koshiw (Artemia Press, 2003). The story of the
life and death of Georgi Gongadze in 2000 and of the so-termed Melnychenko Tapes.