So the Beeb backed International Women’s Day last weekend by announcing that it would show more women’s football on the box from next season.
Normally, I wouldn’t have been too fussed about this, but some of the comments made for alarming reading.
It was denounced as a “waste of the licence fee”, as being “rammed down our throats”. One person demanded that women’s football have it’s own part of the website “so for us that are not interested in their game…don’t have to see it.”
Not being interested is fine, not every sport is for everyone. And women’s football certainly isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, as the Olympics showed last summer.
But like many taunts, it isn’t the words as much as the tone and implications that matter.
‘This is rammed down our throats and is a waste because it is rubbish’ is what is essentially being said. When it isn’t!
The 4-3 game between the US and Canadian women in the Olympics was more enjoyable than most of the Premier League games I have seen this year, and the quality was extremely high;
Arsenal Ladies continue to set new standards in the British game, and the game is only improving.
So don’t watch the highlights next season if you don’t like it, but please can we stop the ill-informed nonsense that women’s football doesn’t deserve the coverage. Because that is rubbish.
Tickets for the World Chess Boxing Grand Prix at Scala on Pentonville Road next week don’t come cheap, but are worth a punt to catch such an odd sport in action.
However much you try and talk about it, chess and boxing just don’t want to sound good together, but that’s part of the attraction.
Barry Hearn – the great promoter of ‘less mainstream’ sports – seems to have targeted table tennis as his next big project, but I could really see chess boxing taking off on TV.
You would be able to see all sorts of shapes and sizes taking part; big brutes could outfox brainboxes or be knocked out by them – there’s the potential for some great David and Goliath stories.
Before this column is plagued by comments claiming it is shoving women’s sport down everyone’s throats, one of the most enjoyable stories this week has to be the return of the Big Four in tennis.
Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray are playing in the same tournament for the first time since Wimbledon last year, and it makes the tennis year seem VERY exciting again.
Tennis is a sport where the women’s game is just nowhere near the quality of the men, and we really are blessed to be in an era where there are four phenomenal players all battling it out against each other.
