Bookmaker Reviews

Today it’s normal to see a load of women going to a football match and being every bit as enthusiastic and knowledgeable as the men at the match, but this is a pretty recent development. Only twenty years ago, females were still very much a minority at matches and even then it looked like most of them were just dragging along their man hoping that he would return the favour by going shopping with her at the weekend.

I became interested in football as a child, due to my friendship with my neighbour – a teenage lad whose obsession with, and knowledge of, both football and cricket was amazing. It was down to him that I started to watch football on television (back in those days, this meant only Match Of The Day late on Saturday night BBC and the F.A. Cup Final every year). Even this small amount of viewing disturbed my parents, who thought it was odd for a girl to like sport, but I was a headstrong person and my love of the sport and my understanding of it grew quickly.

By the time I was in my teens, this was a full-blown obsession. Pop bands, movie stars…they were for the other girls – my idols were footballers. To this day I can recollect sitting in a queue by the school hall, ready to take my Spanish exam, and despite the fact that all the other girls were still desperately scanning through the language course book, I was randomly flicking through a football magazine. (I didn’t do very well in the exam!)

As soon as I had got out of school and had my own income, I wanted to go out and experience football live. My parents were distressed at the very notion, so I roped in a family friend and his son, who was a couple of years younger than me, to be my bodyguards. The three of us went to a number of matches around our area, taking in many of the London clubs and places like Brighton (a top level club at the time). At one time, my dad for some reason decided that he should make an effort to try to build more of a bond with his daughter and went with us on an excursion to Chelsea. My eternal memory of the day was being embarrassed about the expletives from the fans around us that my father was having to hear, and I never included him on our football trips again!

Having left home and moved to a new place with my job, I quickly got friendly with a number of guys who were all mad about football. When the World Cup was on television, three of us took it in turns to have a crowd round to our houses to watch all the major matches. I can recollect watching one World Cup Final sitting halfway up an open plan staircase as one of my mates had invited so many buddies into his tiny terraced house that it was virtually standing room only! With the state of my eyesight today, I’d most likely want binoculars or Laser eye surgery just to be able to focus on the screen now!

So, there was a basic gang of five of us, and as this was going back to the days when there were nearly always matches on a Wednesday evening, we got into the habit of going to a midweek match when we’d finished work. Living in the south eastern corner of England gave us a wide range of clubs to visit, from the First Division (as the top division was known before the days of Sky’s money) through to a decent quality of non-league teams. It was hugely therapeutic to arrive at halfway through the working week in an unpleasant job and then head to the match and vent pent-up anxiety or anger by shouting at the referee and applauding the players. (I notice football chants have never moved on from questioning if the ref is blind? Nowadays, with so much money and sponsorship involved, surelysupporters should be asking if he needs Laser eye surgery? In fact, I’m shocked that the authorities haven’t already found a sponsor who will fund Laser eye treatment as part of the arrangement!)

As time passed, the members of our little gang moved on to other occupations in other places and the football trips stopped, although I now and then went along to watch a local team with another acquaintance who generally went on his own, and who was happy to have company sometimes. Even that arrangement stopped when he moved to another county, and I reverted to watching football on television just as I had years ago. But somehow the over commercialisation and constant saturation broadcasts on satellite television, combined with the complete refusal to embrace Laser eye or similar technology to assist decision making, gradually made me come to dislike the game. I completely lost interest in it.

That is, until a couple of years ago. A good female friend has always hated football, and having listened to me telling her many times that it is totally different live to what you see on television, she finally announced that she would like to attend a match with me. I let her select what team she wanted to follow, as she had two local league clubs to choose from and then I got the tickets. Understanding that she had no knowledge of the rules, I quietly outlined the referee’s decisions for her and pointed out things that she might not have seen. By full time, she was desperate to go again. And, as long as time and money permit, we’ve been turning up ever since!

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