And to print pictures of them falling out of their clothes.

I can't cut chunks out and reply to each as I'm posting on my phone (whilst waiting for my little girl to get off to sleep.. 15 months and loves kicking a ball around. She'll play for England!)

But I'm not at all sure where the allegation that team sports were invented as some way of subjugating women! Without wanting to dig out any old books on the history of Football, for example, that does sound a Ike like Millie Tant in Viz. There have been sports for thousands of years. Cricket was the front runner in terms of team games and isn't all about big burley men. Many football clubs, Macc Town included, came into being to give the cricket club something to do in winter. I'm not sure if you know who founded Manchester City, She was called Anna Connell, a church rector who wanted something to keep the men occupied and away from drink and crime. St Marks (West Gorton) became Ardwick FC and later Manchester City.

And your US sports analogy doesn't really wash either. College and High School sport is popular despite the lower level of quality on show not because that's all some towns and cities have. Take 'American Football' over there.

There are 32 NFL franchises that's not even one per state. You can live in a city the size of Birmingham, Manchester or even London and not have one. Your nearest is hundreds of miles away. They don't have the same system of a League Pyramid as footba does here where most towns have a club who could theoretically climb up the divisions.

High School Football feeds into college football which then feeds into the NFL. Football fans who want to support anyone local, only really have the college and high school teams.

That's why over there, teams of players not that much better than me in my heyday play in front of several thousand when I was playing in front of the striker's girlfriend and her mate.

But although i do agree that the male oriented reporting of female sport tends to disparage the sport itself on the grounds of looks, and that is something that possibly the London Olympics will help to address (And you can't blame the likes of Jessica Ennis for cashing in on being both talented and attractive), you are never going to get the same coverage of major sports, just because the media is so tied up with the Premier League.

Macc were in the top 100 Football clubs in the country last season (we got relegated. I'm still gutted) but you try and find more than a column inch in the nationals, or even a sentence in some. Outside of the Macclesfield Express, we get probably less coverage than some of the top women's clubs. Despite bein better supported.

In football at least there are moves in the right direction. The top division has gone semi pro, and ESPN televises games - more than League One and Two get televised combined.

How many people watch on the other hand, I don't know.



The FA ban was insanity, clearly, but have other sports had the same treatment? Women's rugby isn't as popular, for example.

On the point of American sports, it's interesting to note that American sport for a very long time has been more about gambling than about promoting local loyalties. Hence a) the obsession with statistics, and b) the greater indifference to teams relocating.

On the matter of football, it's my contention that at the top level, it's no longer a sport, but actually a very slick 'sports entertainment' package - an aspirational lifestyle guide (for men and women) come soap opera with the occasional bit of sport thrown in. But that's for another day and thread.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

On the historical origins of the masculine dominance of team sports, nobody has yet mentioned the importance of schools and the military. Both encourage sport for fitness and both were originally exclusively male. With the Military especially the use of team games to promote teamwork and bonding.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

That's not the allegation I made. My rather condensed point was simply that the rules and regulations of most spectator sports we follow today were drawn up in a particular historical environment. The 'inventors' of these rules — though not necessarily of the sports themselves — were often products of English boys-only public schools. Once the new rules were in place, team sports — from which the proles had previously been discouraged for fear that they would lead to brawling and rioting — suddenly became a source of order, a diversion from politics, and a means to get exuberant young men with leisure time on their hands to learn discipline, teamwork and respect for rules. This was an explicitly masculine project, and it both depended on and reinforced 19th-century gender roles: sporting men were active, united, competitive and in the public sphere. This in turn fed the cult of bigger-faster-stronger, the virile values associated with empire, the military, capitalism, and other victorian symbols of power and prosperity. Women were excluded from all of these for the same reason: it was supposed that men could do them better.

Although sports have been patriarchal since the Greeks, it's possible to imagine that if they'd been regulated at a different moment in history, they might have reflected different values. For instance, in some pre-industrial village running races, the contestants were each given a different handicap (for example, carrying different weights). The spectators' interest was not in cheering for the übermensch, but in making the outcome less predictable so that betting would be more fun and more profitable.


That explains some of it. But not the big tv audiences. Not the fact that NFL games cannot be played on Fridays and Saturdays because those days are reserved for college football. And not the the University of Southern California football team's ability to draw crowds of 90,000, while Los Angeles is unable to sustain a profitable NFL franchise.


Indeed. I don't expect that. However, I do think, for instance, the opening and closing matches of Wimbledon should alternate between the men's and women's singles. I do think Arsenal could do a better job of encouraging fans to watch their women's team (which is one of the best in Europe), especially by engaging local schools and grassroots football teams. (And why doesn't Man Utd have a women's team? They could surely afford one.) And I do think women's sport could have more visibility in the media, and be covered in less reductive ways, if there were more women on the sports desk, for example. And if Dacre weren't such a cunt.

I don't blame Jessica Ennis for doing publicity, quite the contrary. I won't criticise the beach volleyball players either. The obstacle is the media. The Mail is among the worst, of course. Its narratives for stories about women are so reductive and inelastic that there simply isn't anything it could write about female athletes that wouldn't be T&A, hair and makeup, or gosh-but-she's-a-woman! Which is pretty pathetic for 2012. Like you, I hope the Olympics will help provide a counter-weight.


That qualifying clause is important. The teams in the women's premier league in England don't get much coverage in the local press either, and the women's media aren't interested. Britain is behind in this. Lyon drew more than 20,000 spectators to their game against Arsenal last season, and league matches in Germany, Scandinavia and Russia pull in similar crowds to Macclesfield.

Sorry for your team's relegation, by the way. My stepfather sort-of-supports Barnet, so he is happy. Well, more like relieved!


I don't know — when did the MCC admit women? There are still golf clubs and bowls clubs that only allow women to play at certain times of day, and not long ago they were probably restricted to making sandwiches. I can remember when women's track and field didn't include the 400 metres hurdles or any race longer than 1500 metres, and even at the last winter Olympics there was a men's but no women's ski-jumping event — in spite of the fact that the world record holder for the event was a woman. How many women are there on the International Olympic Committee, I wonder? On the board of FIFA or the Lawn Tennis Association? There's progress, but it's slow.


Let's hope so!

Public Service Announcement.

Readers of this thread might be interested to know that at 11.20pm BBC2 is showing a programme called Sexism in Football.

As you were.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

For some time now I've been coaching Gaelic football to both males and females of all ages. In my experience the level of interest that children have in playing is about the same up to around 14 or 15 years old but after this age, keeping girls interested is a struggle especially if they are not strong players and starting games regularly as things like more school work and distractions like boys start taking up more of their interest. At adult level I often find that getting female players to come out for training and even play games be even trickier. Nevertheless the female version of the game is popular over here. The All Ireland finals day attracts crowds of around 25-30,000 and many games of the championship season are broadcast live by TG4 (the Irish language TV station) over the course of the summer with the finals day attracting one of its biggest viewerships of the year. It doesn't be neck and neck in the media with the main mens sports like mens Gaelic football, hurling, association football or rugby when it comes to public consciousness and press attention but in local, regional and national media you'll often find results, fixtures, reports, player profiles etc. to the extent that I reckon most womens team sports in Britain would kill to have such an equivalent profile.

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"The first casualty on your Facebook wall is always facts..."

#rightwingpoliticalcorrectness - for when some "Tell it like it is" bullshitter plays the political correctness card, often without irony!

That would back up what the WSFF report says. Interest drops off earlier and quicker for girls, and a great big divide opens up between sporty and less sporty pupils. I was one of the latter, and I certainly didn't put much effort into PE in secondary school. I remember in high jump, for example, we were all made to practise with the bar at the same height, even though I was a foot shorter than some of the girls in my year. Netball was pointless for the same reason. As soon as there was an element of competition in PE, I, together with the fat girls and the other bookish dweebs, would make no effort at all. It made failure feel less humiliating. I remember getting one of those patronising rounds of applause at sports day when I finished a race miles after everyone else, and feeling really insulted. I wanted total, funereal silence.

I'd always kicked a ball about with my cousins during the school holidays, but never joined a football team or anything until I studied in the US for a year. Women's soccer is taken seriously there, and my college had dozens of teams covering all abilities. It's somewhat disparaged by American blokes, who consider it a sport for girls and Mexicans, so the context was different: it didn't feel like we were playing in the shadow of men. And of course my teammates and coaches were unfailingly positive and encouraging, no matter how badly I played. It couldn't have been more different from school PE.


Why, then, do girls not distract boys from participating in sport? I mean, we're led to believe that adolescent boys think about literally nothing else.


Camogie is quite well-followed, too, isn't it? And you're making an interesting point, nobody is asking for women's sport to have equal prominence — it would just be nice to have it taken seriously. The Mail can't allow itself to do that, because it would then have to take all kinds of women's activities and professions seriously.

There is a massive drop out rate in boys participation aged 14 and 15.
My evidence for this is 2 lads going through youth football.
Boys find other interests, leave the team, and most small clubs struggle to field a team, or need to radically collapse their numbers of teams at this age group.

The survivors coalesce around the bigger clubs.
The dropout rate is less noticeable to outsiders because the initial uptake is so much higher than the girls game, so they'l still see games going on.

I'm not sure that this solves the issue of girls participation, but I think it's worth starting with acurate data.

I'll possibly throw out some thoughts about competitive sport in schools, and the move of sport away from schools later on today.

I was fairly sporty at school. I was good enough to be in the school teams for rugby, cricket and football. I was also in boxing and swimming clubs. I switched off the team games suddenly in the fifth year. A large part of the reason was that matches were usually on Saturday mornings and I had a part time job Thursday and Friday evenings and wanted to switch to Saturdays. But I'd also lost interest. I could have joined a Sunday league club as some of my former team-mates did but I felt I'd out grown it, I'd been playing these games since I was 7 and in my mind I think 'playing' equalled childish. I had also developed other interests (guitars, girls and drinking mostly). I dropped the boxing shortly after I started work full time because my boss didn't like me meeting customers with a face full of bruises.

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That subtle admixture of the absurd and the surreally plausible...

From my own experience, it comes down to girls maturing earlier than boys (although sometimes I'd wonder if it is the case!) and relative social and peer pressures, many boys will hang on playing until they're around 16 to 18 but not make the jump up to play in adult competitions while in their mid-teen years their peers will still participate in sports. Depending on different schools, being part of the school rugby or Gaelic football team gives a player an elevation in social status. Also many teen girls, wherever they play the sport of not, will often come out to see boys games being played whist walking around pitch perimeter eyeing up players and even spectators.


Camogie is still popular in some places, especially where hurling tends to be more popular than Gaelic football, but it's dead in many others. The nearest camogie club to me is over 20 miles away. In terms of participation, ladies Gaelic football has many more numbers playing than camogie in Ireland nowadays.
I can only speak from a Gaelic football and somewhat Gaelic games/GAA perspective, but I reckon what helps a lot for sporting recognition of womens camogie and football players is the "pride of the parish" mentality where everyone is seen as able to do their bit. Some men who play or watch Gaelic football or hurling aren't bothered about watching these games but it is more down to not normally finding the skill and excitement levels as high as their mens counterparts can be and you'll hear the very occasional misogynistic remark mainly from smart alecs, but the image of female players being sex objects is virtually non-existent. It also helps that many journalists, especially younger ones, that write and cover Gaelic games give plenty of respect to female participants. As an example of the "pride of the parish" principle, a few years ago myself and a local woman who plays for her senior team coached the under 14 girls team, for most games either home or away our supporters were mainly the girls' parents. We got to the county final and with a bit of promotion through putting up posters in local shops beforehand, we brought a crowd of about another 200 with us to the game including many boys and men whom would have no family links with the players or coaches.

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"The first casualty on your Facebook wall is always facts..."

#rightwingpoliticalcorrectness - for when some "Tell it like it is" bullshitter plays the political correctness card, often without irony!

A rather different photograph of beach volleyball players, from the excellent series in yesterday's Telegraph:

That was a rather good gallery, actually.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

Olympic beach volleyball team stop traffic in London's Parliament Square sporting briefs and bikinis

Briefs and bikinis? At the same time?

To be sure it gets publicised in the Mail, of course.