Mary Earps is 1-7 on to be voted Sports Personality of the Year. One of the curiosities of the moment is the ineligibility of Joey Barton to cast his vote for the United Kingdom’s favourite footballer on gender grounds.
What a shame. Barton has never played women’s football, not spent one minute in the female professional environment. He knows nothing of the challenges women face, little of the female psyche or anatomy in the football context. All of this discounts his vote because he cannot make a judgement about Earps as a footballer. This is absurd, of course. It is the logic of ignorance. Barton’s logic.
Poor Joey. All that adult learning unravelling. The mind that opened when he walked through the doors of Roehampton to read for a degree in philosophy appears to be as closed as ever it was before his age of enlightenment. The carefully curated optics which would have him as an intellectual, right down to his heavily-framed spectacles, are revealed as false markers.
What a perverse reverse. Having escaped the brutal, violent privations of his upbringing in the Huyton, Liverpool, Barton appears strapped to a recidivist rocket back to the prejudices that shaped him.
Beating his chest, he attacked women commentators working in the men’s game, particularly Alex Scott, on the basis of gender. They don’t have the knowledge, apparently. Then he doubled down on his Stone Age misogyny by dismissing both Scott’s ability as a player and the quality of women’s football in comparison with the men’s game.
Barton asserts that he knows more about football than Scott, that he believes he was a better player than Scott, but is happy to welcome her to his podcast to debate the point, which of course would be a waste of her time since his mind is already made up.
Judging by her response, in which she urged women and girls to chase their footballing dreams, she has little appetite for Barton mansplaining.
Having also studied for a philosophy degree, I am puzzled by Barton’s certainties. Like him I was a son of the north born into reduced social circumstance. Education offered an escape but not in a way I imagined.
I strode into my first Middlesex Poly symposium as a mature student bristling with Manc self-regard, wondering what Plato and Aristotle could ever teach me.
Three years later I left with a profound understanding of Socratic wisdom, namely a sense of how little I knew about anything. But my mind was wide open, primed to absorb and explore new ways of seeing.
It appears Barton has experienced a reverse journey, ploughing on eyes wide shut.
Testosterone deficit has no impact when women play women. The game stands on its own merit. Do we enjoy the women’s 100m any less because men are absent? Is the career of Serena Williams invalidated because she did not beat a man in the Wimbledon final or at Flushing Meadows? Are Martina Navratilova’s observations on male tennis players devalued because she never played one?
Football is a pretty simple game. However, were understanding of it a function of competence on the pitch, there would be no Arsene Wengers, Jose Mourinhos, Jurgen Klopps or dare we say it Sir Alex Fergusons, since none excelled as a player. Inversely, the late Sir Bobby Charlton, arguably England’s greatest, would have soared as a coach, yet failed at the first attempt at Deepdale.
Barton, trapped behind his aggressive, alpha blindfold, falls into the familiar trap of overstating the value of experience at the expense of intellect. The game can be understood, deconstructed, appreciated without having kicked a ball. All opinions are relevant, but stand or fall on the quality of the argument that sustains them.
Barton’s bombastic boasts amount to bullying not debate. Crude points are still crude no matter how loud the voice asserting them.
The divine Mary will make the case for women in sport better than any when she accepts the BBC gong, a footballer of substance who, along with her colleagues, has captured the imagination of the public. Even Nike felt her power, Earps goalie jerseys selling out within minutes after an embarrassing replica shirt U-turn.
On Sunday almost 60,000 watched Arsenal play Chelsea off the park at the top of the Women’s Super League.
Watching Arsenal and England striker Alessia Russo smash the ball into the back of the net felt every bit as nourishing as witnessing her male counterpart Harry Kane putting the ball away, clinical, nerveless, unerring technique.
That Barton is deaf and blind to this development suggests he must have missed the memos from Socrates. Thankfully, he need only reach out to Google to catch up. “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing…education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel.”
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/PbKqcui
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