I remember the exact moment, kicking a football off the kerbs of the estate where I grew up, when I found out that girls couldn’t be professional footballers. This was 20 years ago and thankfully, a lot has changed since then.
I can picture being the only girl who played football on the courts with the boys at lunchtime; and standing on the sports field in PE jealously watching the boys while we played another dirge of rounders. I remember every teacher who told me girls weren’t supposed to play football, and the looks on their faces when I wore a Tottenham shirt to the school disco instead of a dress. I still have the picture of Gustavo Poyet I had hung on the wall instead of the Spice Girls.
The point of this is not to self-indulge, but I recall all these things because at the time, I would never have envisaged that on Wednesday night, a home European Championship kicks off in England and people are genuinely, tangibly excited.
We still have a way to go. Try buying women’s football boots and it’s not always easy; I know this because I have peculiarly tiny feet and tried recently, to no avail. Of the girls I used to coach, at least half of them had never kicked a ball when they arrived.
And try getting injured at the levels below the Women’s Super League and having to pay for your own treatment if you want it done without having to wait so long it might ruin a good portion of your career. Try working a demanding full-time job before traipsing out to a second-class facility that most clubs wouldn’t have their boys’ academy sides playing on.
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On Wednesday night I will be thinking of all the players who persevered, despite being told this wasn’t a sport for them. I’ll be thinking of that eight-year-old playing football in the street wondering why women weren’t allowed to be footballers. And I’ll be thinking of my mum, who started going to football in the 1960s because whatever people may have said back then, she didn’t think it was weird for girls to like Manchester United (I still do, frankly, but each to their own).
Hopefully, I won’t be thinking of every man I overhear almost weekly on the Tube complaining that there were too many of us in the away end. Or every one who’d asked me if I actually liked football, and was it my boyfriend that got me into it?
Yes, we do like it – and tonight, 22 of us will be walking out at a sold-out Old Trafford. That is very, very cool.
But I’ve never believed that not following women’s football makes you some kind of raving misogynist; people just aren’t told about it enough. I hope we can change that over the next four weeks.
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