I have, to my surprise, become a devotee of women’s football. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not because they’re women that I’m surprised, but because it’s football: a game which hasn’t interested me much since 2008, when Manchester United won the Premier League and the UEFA Champions League, and I was only excited by that because, as a Mancunian, I’d had to choose one team or another and preferred the colour red to the colour blue.
That’s not quite the whole of it. After the Munich air crash, which I’d learned about in the school showers after gym, I got teary and possessive whenever United won anything. I’m not sure that either of these is a good reason for supporting a team, but then what is?
The game itself, whoever was playing, did not engage me once genius dribblers with low centres of gravity, like George Best, went out of fashion and commentators talked of “man-to-man marking”. Football as chess wasn’t as good, in my view, as chess as chess. The board grew congested. Players fouled one another professionally and would rather pass the ball than score. They made pretty patterns but didn’t stir the heart.
The game grew too rich for risk, and too international — every team a band of sponsored mercenaries from somewhere else. In what sense, as the money rolled in, was Manchester United Mancunian? And if sport in general lost its local roots, so too did it become more and more disconnected in ambition and technology from its origins in communal play. Tennis has become marvellously refined, but I no longer go to bed crying after a match as I did when Drobný defeated Rosewall in 1954 because I wanted both of them to win. Do I imagine that they each had only one racket? Djokovic, who breaks his back carrying a bag of hundreds, is an extraordinary player, but for years he has looked overstrung, as though every tendon in his body is about to snap. Yes, that makes him worth the cost of admittance, but the joy of winning seems, for him, to have long outstripped the joy of playing.
“The game grew too rich for risk, and too international – every team a band of sponsored mercenaries from somewhere else.”
Call me a sentimentalist, but — speaking as a spectator — I miss the sport of sport. Players and athletes can become too good. It’s said of some writers that they tune language so finely that it becomes a barrier to communion. And so it is with sport, the commonality of recreation mortgaged to the madness of making history and money. Being the best. Being the best ever. Ought there not to be some faith kept with our first impulse to put up a net across the street and hit balls for the fun of it?
No, I am not going to say I enjoy women’s football because its players are less professional than the men. I love it because it has so far retained the original exuberance of play. This is not to damn with faint praise. Quite the opposite. What the women’s game shows is that exhilaration and skill can co-exist. Gusto and flair are no more second-rate qualities than the cynical lethargy of the men’s game is evidence of its superiority. I’m not going to call it innocence, because in a world of over-sophistication that sounds like condescension; but by keeping us in touch with why we played any game when we were young, the joy we experienced in discovering our skills (supposing we had any), women footballers narrow the distance between performer and spectator — even as they do things that at last we never could. This is what makes the Lionesses, whose flair and gusto would seem to be unmatched in the women’s game, so thrilling to watch.
In their victories over Sweden and Italy they defied likelihood and, at times, justice, by an extraordinary combination of adroitness and ineptitude, messing up wave after wave of attacking verve with sloppiness and inaccuracy — only to land the coup de grâce at last with a deadly sharpness that any footballer would envy.
I don’t doubt there was method in those relentlessly attacking waves. More method still would probably get them off to better starts. But if coming from behind is what they do best, we should salute it. Never giving up is a species of artistry too. And whatever else, it keeps us on the edge of our seats.
“Finding a way to win” is how the Lionesses describe what they do. And to say they do that with resilience and energy is to underrate their invention. Not impossibly, that resilience and invention will fail them in the final. Whichever team they play will be better organised than they are. The Lionesses, I heard a commentator say, are not so good at “keeping their shape”. The phrase sent a cold chill through me. Shape. Woman-to-woman marking. An intimation of the future in which women’s football will, like the men’s game, have its spontaneity and vitality drilled out of it
So we must delight in the Lionesses while they are still wild.
