Dirty, dirty Leeds. Dirty fucking Leeds. After reading David Peace’s novel The Damned Utd these words cycled through my head for days. They work as an obsessive refrain in Peace’s account of Brian Clough’s infamous 44 days as the manager of (dirty, dirty) Leeds.

I knew nothing about Clough, Leeds, and this bizarre story before reading Peace’s novel. Nevertheless, his writing drew me in – aggressively.  I felt as if Clough himself, in all his puerile genius, had wormed his way into my head.  And that voice was irritating – arrogant, monomaniacal, defensive.  The intensity and distinctiveness of Peace’s writing is such that it makes you care about, even identify with this deeply flawed and narcissistic character.

The writing bears no resemblance to traditional sports narrative – the novel borders on experimental, in fact. Its momentum is entropic. Things don’t come together in this story, they fall apart.

Like any fan of a novel, I reacted to the news that it was being turned into a movie with suspicion.  I couldn’t imagine how a novel with such a narrow range of focus, a novel whose setting is really one man’s emotional landscape, could possibly be translated into a commercial film.  If it has a happy ending, it is well outside the novel’s plot – in what happened after he left Leeds, and reconnected with his partner, coach Peter Taylor.  (They led Nottingham Forest in the late 1970s through an amazing run of League Cups, European Cups, and went unbeaten for an insane 42 games.)

In the movie theater, a couple near me asked if this was a “sports movie, you know, like an underdog story.”  Every sports narrative apparently demands this structure: the unlikely hero who overcomes the odds and wins the big game.

Fortunately, the answer to this question is – No, this is not an underdog story. This is a film about a guy who was an underdog when he took over Derby County and led them from the bottom of the second division to the top of the first in two years. (Imagine!) This is the story of a manager whose “touch” seems actually particular to underdog teams, like Derby County and Nottingham Forest – as well as underrated players (Taylor specialized in picking up players other teams had written off). But he was not, really, the underdog so much as the outsider when he took over Leeds – and failed.

Clough was a hater – and no team was as much the object of his ire than Leeds United. His antipathy towards Leeds was by no means a secret. Incredibly, when Leeds manager Don Revie was asked to take on the England national team, Leeds asked Clough to take over. Moth to the flame, Clough accepted the job, and bungled – he was sacked after 44 days of antagonism and controversy.

So, departing from the sports script, here there is no glorious win. Just the story of an impudent, self-centered (gifted) bastard so driven by hate that he takes over a team in order to take them apart.

The film is gentler than the book. (A film that stuck to the maniacal tone of Peace’s writing would, in fact, be almost unwatchable.) The screenplay splits its time between Clough’s Oedipal struggle against Revie, and his friendship with his Taylor (who refused to move to Leeds with Clough). Their relationship is explicitly cast in terms of love — the film plays with their dynamic as a couple, and this is where any of the tenderness and emotion in the film is expressed.  The happy resolution demanded by mainstream cinema is organized around their reconciliation.

I loved the film. But I also love English weather and Thomas Hardy novels. It’s visually gorgeous, but everything is gray, wet, and dilapidated. If there is paint on the walls, it’s peeling. If there is wallpaper, it’s greasy. Glass is grimey. Fields are muddy. Ceilings are low and stained. Early on, there is a lovely scene of Clough, desperate to impress, trying to tidy up the facilities at Derby before an early match against Leeds – polishing tarnished brass, scrubbing blacked grout. There isn’t a lot of game footage, but what is there is dirty: all I remember about those scenes is mud, rain, and blood.

The film is notable for its realism and its refusal to glamorize the game. This is, I think, where the film pays homage to the era (and Peace’s writing) most faithfully:  This story unfolds before the hyper-mediatization of football.  The sport feels fleshy and personal.  Its aesthetic sensibility is the dead opposite of a film like Goal, or even Douglas Gordon’s art house hit, Zidane: Portrait of the 21st Century. There just wasn’t that much money in either the game or in the broadcasting of the game (at least not like there is today).  The sport, as we encounter it today, has been cleaned up for the camera.  The Damned United’s story seems to signal the beginning of these shifts.

There is another “money” story here – that of English class politics.  Clough’s brashness, the criticism that he was “too much”, that he was inappropriate, crass, and too ambitious is the complaint made against a man who doesn’t “know his place.” If he was an upstart and pretender, it was because he refused to let his own working class origins limit his imagination – and he also knew that he’d never get past the door if he waited for someone to open it for him. To this day, Clough is referred to as “the greatest manager England never had,” and most assume he was never invited to lead the country’s team because the FA couldn’t stand the idea of having someone like Clough in this representative role.

Given the centrality of class to Clough’s story, the phrase “dirty, dirty Leeds” (repeated hundreds of times in Peace’s novel) takes on an added importance.

Everything around Clough feels shabby and worthless when compared to what Revie has. Even though Clough knows he’s the better manager, that at Derby he was managing the better team, something in him makes him feel like this was not enough.  Clough is more boy than man, invested in a recognition (from Revie) that he’ll never get (Revie refuses the hand Clough offers him, not in a deliberate slight but because he didn’t notice Clough, who was cloaked in insignificance).

As we watch Clough nervously cleaning up Derby’s shabby facilities, we see him trying to scrub away the dirt of a working class world — his world.  In these details, we see a man who on some level feels he will never be good enough, a man incapable, too, of being happy with what he has. And of course, this restlessness, this discontent was behind the arrogance and ambition that made him such a legend.

Caster Semenya

The issue of gender testing in sports has hit the headlines again. South African runner Caster Semenya has become the subject of considerable speculation about her gender after she went to Berlin and claimed the world championship in the 800m, crossing the line at 1:55.45, two seconds faster than her nearest rival.

A number of athletes and commentators have cried “foul” and demanded that Semenya prove her sex to the IAAF, who announced that she had already been tested and that the results would later be announced. Rising above the phobic and cruel rhetoric of the press, her competitors and the track authorities, her family and supporters speak frankly of her boyish body and express anger at the way questions about Semenya’s gender have been handled. In this interview posted on The Guardian’s website, her father quite proudly defies the narrow minded to assert that his daughter looks “just like me” and “is a woman.” She grew up playing football with the boys, being teased for being a “tomboy,” etc. And, her family and friends chime in together, she is a woman.

She is, quite clearly, a gender warrior and the case of Caster Semenya raises the question of what it is we are looking for when we segregate men’s and women’s sports. Earlier this year, I looked at the same issue in soccer, which is worth revisiting here now.

Playing with boys

In 2004, Mexican National Women’s Team superstriker Maríbel Dominguez was signed to a two-year contract with Celaya FC, a second division men’s team. FIFA stepped in with an official prohibition and the assertion “There must be a clear separation between men’s and women’s football.” The memo furthermore forbid her from playing in exhibition games with the men’s squad.

My question today is why “must” the separation between men’s and women’s football be “clear”?

Maríbel Dominguez

Dominguez played for years with boys, successfully disguising her gender and enjoying a level of play not available to girls of her generation. Nicknamed “Marigol,” in 2004 she was a highly ranked international player who went on to play for the Atlanta Beat, FC Indiana, FC Barcelona, and the Girona team EU L’Estartit.

Nearly every feature story on Marta makes a big deal out of how she grew up playing with boys as if this were unusual. Of course it’s fun to read about Marta’s childhood years fighting macho attitudes on dusty pitches and in the street — but just once I would like to see it acknowledged that her experience is not extraordinary. It is in fact absolutely typical for female players, especially (but not only) those living in places where women’s sports is not accepted. In the U.S., girls play with boys, by the way, and many also find themselves combating patriarchal attitudes about sports when they lace up their boots. Brazil hardly has a monopoly on machismo.

Playing with boys as you grow up is totally ordinary, in other words. Where girls don’t have to sneak into boys games, they start off playing organized youth soccer together. There is much debate about the age that girls and boys should separate. As girls mature earlier it can be to their advantage to play with boys through much of adolescence: in Germany, they play together until they are 17 (I am not sure if this is true for the highest level of U-17 teams – I suspect the rule is that girls are only forced off boys teams at 17). Clearly this hasn’t hindered the development of the men’s or the women’s game. Germany’s women’s team holds the World Cup, and are consistently ranked in the top three.

All of this is to say that Marta is unique not because she played with boys, but because she was one of the very best players on every boys team on which she played.

To return to FIFA’s intervention against Celaya’s inclusion of Dominguez on their roster: If a female player can handle herself in a men’s professional league, why shouldn’t she be allowed to play? What would be the harm?  I don’t buy that FIFA is interested in protecting the development of the women’s game in Mexico – not that I would endorse such an explanation (in which an organization dominated by old, white patriarchs is working to “protect” women against their own desires).

If Maribel Dominguez had played for Celaya FC, and held her own (never mind excelled) she would have profoundly unsettled notions about the difference between men and women.

Gender difference is not absolute

The difference between men and women’s football must be clear because the difference between men and women themselves must be absolute. Gender difference, however, is not absolute, and it doesn’t take much research to find soccer stories which raise interesting questions about our investment in gender segregation in sport.

Noko Matlou

The South African National Team player Noko Matlou had her gender questioned by Ghana’s National Team in 2007, who sent a match official into the dressing room to establish that she wasn’t a man. Matlou was named Africa’s female player of the year in February 2009.

The 2008 Africa Women’s Cup was marred by a lot of things (bad refereeing, overt attempts to undermine press coverage of the games, last minute changes in scheduling of training sessions for visiting teams, etc). It was also packed with major upsets. Floating around the blogosphere has been a very interesting story: Two teams (Cameroon and Nigeria) filed complains with the Confederation of African Football accusing the eventual champions (and host team) Equatorial Guinea of fielding two men.

What little information I’ve found on this is not very helpful and is limited by homophobia or ignorance. To this day, a lot of Nigerian players are insistent that they were MEN (one article reports that a Nigerian forward in essence felt a player up on the field). That doesn’t necessarily explain the 1-0 loss, though. They’d played the same line-up previously and won and didn’t file a complaint then. Their credibility is undermined by this fact.

While the Nigerian players say the two defenders were men, over time the language of the story as it has been reported in African newsletters has shifted to suggest the players are intersex — meaning, born with sexual characteristics that do not conform to traditional definitions of male/female gender.

Nigeria

Sadly, if the players are indeed intersex, they would be banned from the game for having for a physiology that challenges the notion that gender difference is immutable. And, as it happens, one of Nigeria’s own players was recently “outed” as intersexed, and banned from the game. She was the second in the national squad’s history to be so exiled and talk is that she may undergo surgery in order to become eligible to play women’s football again.

But should her body be medically altered so she can play football? Does women’s football really need her to do so? Medical management of intersexuality is a frightening story of institutions deciding to force a body to conform to its ideas about sex/gender at great cost to the person on whose interests doctors pretend to be acting. Such surgeries are about managing the anxiety of parents and doctors and not about enhancing the life and happiness of the intersexed person.

Policing the border

In response to the scandal caused by the complaints about Equitorial Guinea, the Confederation of African Football will institute a “gender test”: naming a body that menstruates as female. This test is notoriously unreliable, as is any other test grounded on a single factor. The institution of this in African women’s football is a serious step in the wrong direction.

The policing of these borders creates problems for especially female athletes. The Journal of the American Medical Association explains:

Gender verification has long been criticized by geneticistist, endocrinologists and others in the medical community. One major problem [is] unfairly excluding women who had a birth defect involving gonads and external genitalia (i.e., male psuedohermaphrodism)…A second problem is that only women, not men, [are] stigmatized by gender verification testing. Systematic follow-up [is] rarely available for female athletes “failing” the test, which often [is] performed under very public circumstances. Follow-up [is] crucial because the problem is not male impostors, but rather confusion caused by misunderstanding of male pseudohermaphroditism. (Simpson et al., “Gender Verification in the Olympics”, JAMA vol.284, pp. 1568-1569, 2000 – cited in Wikipedia’s Gender Verification in Sports)

These cases ask us to consider what it is that we actually want from the gender division in sports. What is it that we are looking for in a women’s game? Surely not a confirmation of the “femininity” of the people on the pitch. It must be something else: like how the women’s game allows us to escape from narrow ideas about who and what women are.

Why shouldn’t women’s football be exactly the game to welcome gender-bending warriors like the intersex athlete, and the transgender warrior? And why should the women’s game be the only one to do so? Let’s make the borders more porous. Better yet, let’s imagine that it is possible to play across them. Because the truth of the matter is, people do, every day, and it’s not that big a deal.

There is no story quite so dull, however, as that of the totally confident person. Fowler and his writer plainly struggled to find those rare moments in his life when he’s been unsure of himself. That uncertainty is confined to anxiety in those months he waited to be called up from Liverpool reserves. Even then, the worry stemmed not from doubt about his ability or concern about if he’d make it. It was more impatience as to when.

Amazingly, when things go “tits up” for him at Liverpool, and as he rides the bench for much of his later career, his confidence in his own ability never seems to waver.  He never questions himself, and has no room for regret. The book (a favorite for Liverpool fans) is more interesting for the inside peek into club politics than it is for Fowler himself. A lack of uncertainly is a part of Fowler’s identity and was a big part of his effectiveness as a player. But in a narrator this quality leaves me cold.

As a genre, player biography is hard. The story of most professional footballers is hampered by the fact that they’ve done nothing else but play the game, and have little to talk about besides either their achievements on the field – with which we are already familiar – or how they blew their fortune, or dealt with addiction, scandal, etc. It’s the rare professional player who actually has a story. Or has the writerly flair it takes to make poetry from the day-to-day life of a footballer as did Eamon Dunphy in his memoir Only A Game?

His book tracks a disastrous year playing for Millwall – he drifts downward from a member of the squad to the reserves, and battles with resentment.  He describes the ordinary pleasures of training, of partnerships with players, and the challenge of professional football in which the joy one takes from playing is always checked by anxiety about not playing – in reading this book, one realizes that this experience is far more characteristic of professional life than the glory of scoring a goal at Wembley. Dunphy was a great writer then, and went on of course to enjoy a career as a journalist.

A few players have stories that diverge from the script to tell us something important. Paul Canoville’s Black and Blue was named “Best Autobiography” at the British Sports Books Awards in the spring. Canoville was Chelsea’s first black player — and this is no story about triumph over adversity. He recounts the story of the racist abuse he took from fans, and, more compellingly, he describes the team’s inability to respond to it or to know how to support him. The story of his development as a player and his amazing social life (his relationships, his many children, his love for the London music scene) is woven into a nuanced exploration of what it was like to find yourself a living lightening rod. The book also confronts his battle with addiction and then cancer without turning those stories into cliché.  It is a compelling read that speaks to anyone who has been subjected to discrimination — and it’s a sobering lesson about the passivity of those who bear witness to it and do nothing. It is also a straightforward account of a difficult life — one marked as much by uncertainty as by determination. It offers no real happy ending, no closure, just the rough contours of an actual life.

This brings me to Ken Loach’s much anticipated Looking for Eric – because in many ways, this film is about what we look for, as fans, from the players we adore.  Looking for Eric opens with a crash. The hero of the film is a depressed postman, Eric Bishop, living a very depressing life in depressing Manchester. Eric takes his car the wrong way around a roundabout. He does this just after seeing his ex-wife across the street (he’s too shy and hurt to cross over and talk to her, too wracked by guilt and anxiety, and so even though she’s waiting for him, he skulks away). Lilly is the love of his life, and he walked out on her without explanation years ago. He is still haunted, however, by his love for her and by hers for him and he stunted by this fact. His friends are worried about him — the crash makes an urgent crisis out of his slow descent, and draws them together around the project of helping him.

One of these stand-up guys is a fan of pop psychology, and initiates a series of gentle interventions. He asks the group of friends to indulge him in an exercise — to first imagine looking at yourself through the eyes of someone who loves you unconditionally, and then imagine looking out at the world through the eyes of someone you admire.  Eric Bishop chooses, as his fantasy point-of-view, Eric Cantona.

Turns out, the last time Eric remembers being happy was years earlier at a match with his friends watching Cantona play. Fandom and football play an important part in this film as the one place where the men are given permission to be themselves, to shout, scream, to “sing together” and laugh. It seems to be the one place where Eric gave himself permission to feel anything, in fact.  (And on this topic, the film is brilliant.)

This lays the foundation for the film’s turn — at a particularly low moment, Eric hallucinates Cantona in his living room, and the imaginary Cantona (played of course by le vrai) proceeds to keep company with our melancholy postman and, in essence, coach him back to life. This coaching centers almost exclusively on getting himself back in communication with Lilly, his ex-wife. (“I like this woman,” Cantona says, “she’s got balls.”)

Though organized around the reparation of his relationship with his wife, this film is about really about men. Eric’s problem, Loach seems to suggest, is as much with the men in his life as it is with women. The film offers a flashback to explain: At a family gathering celebrating the christening of Lily & Eric’s baby, his father gets unnerved watching Lilly blow kisses to his son. “That won’t last long,” he says, as he launches into a nasty tirade about the dead-end trap of marriage and family. In this bullying (expressed as a deep hostility towards women) we get a glimpse of the hard-edged working class masculinity that is closer to Loach’s topic. Even as Eric is repulsed by this, and even as it’s clear this isn’t the kind of man he wants to be, the whole scenario pushes him away. His answer is to run away from it all and not talk about it. (At the film’s start, he can’t even say Lilly’s name.)

Thus the friendship with Cantona — Eric needs a father/brother/friend to lead him out of the woods. And so Cantona encourages Eric turn to his friends to help him through a crisis involving one of his step sons. Talking about his life, his feelings, and his problems has been, up to this point, unimaginable for him. Cantona helps Eric to realize his potential by teaching him to “believe in your teammates, because without that we are lost.” The film is packed with Cantona’s gnomic wisdom, “good lessons” like this and has a wildly optimistic ending. It’s a feel-good bromance with great footage highlighting Cantona’s career. (The French magazine So Foot quite rightly complained, though, that some of this footage feels like it’s there for those audience members who don’t know who Cantona is, or are not aware of the special fondness that Man U fans feel for him.)

I wanted to love it, but this “feel good” ending left me feeling let down. The film ultimately offers a romantic and facile solution to a very difficult situation. Eric conjures Cantona because he needs some of Cantona’s confidence. You can see that confidence in Canonta’s posture -– he strides through the film with chest thrust out like the French rooster. Eric, on the other hand, is skinny, pale, sits with his chest curled around itself, is rumpled and withdrawn. As an audience member I felt I was supposed to root for Eric to “sort himself out” but the fact of the matter is, as a person, I didn’t buy it.  That’s the point at which the film got boring.  I don’t buy that life is like football, and if you can just be “confident” the answers to big questions –- about what one wants, how to repair what’s broken in your life, etc. –- will magically appear. Considering these three texts together, Fowler’s and Cantonville’s autobiographies, and Loach’s “Looking for Eric,” I find myself thinking that sometimes “confidence” is just the uncomplicated psychology of someone who has never really kept company with failure.

The field is smack in the middle of Pico-Union, and right down the street from the new police station. This is the home of the infamous 1990s Ramparts Scandal. It is also the neighborhood of the May Day “Melee” in which the LAPD used violence to break up a peaceful march and demonstration calling for reform in immigration policies in the U.S., and for recognition of the rights of the migrant communities that define the region. (This 2007 blog article has good video of that event – including silent footage of demonstrators being pushed at gunpoint across the soccer field). The cops in this neighborhood have long been working under a self-generated cloud of fear, anger, and mistrust.

Team LAPD

The whole experience was something of a nightmare. The LAPD squad is muscle-bound and incredibly fit. They are a tough team. They can run you into next year, and they don’t shy away from using their size advantage to win the ball. Nothing wrong with that. But they also have a coach who shouts from the sidelines: “Take him out out!” “Take him down!” and “Get him!” – while wearing a dark blue jacket with the letters LAPD across his back. Guys from several teams reported more disturbing remarks made on and off the field by LAPD players – e.g. “This [the game] is all you have, you have nothing to go home to.”

As fit as they are, their ball handling is just OK. When confronted with the better teams in our league – whoplay a fast passing game dependent on great footwork, bursts of speed and an ability to change direction and turn in a blink – the cops were sometimes undone by the very thing they normally rely on: their size, and their physicality.

It’s an old story: the confrontation between a militaristic defensive game and the flash, bob and weave of joga bonito. In general, when things didn’t go their way, they got visibly and audibly frustrated, and played not better but just meaner and harder. They played with a win-at-all-costs attitude, and were convinced every whistle made in their direction was misplaced. They complained endlessly about the referees – so much so that I suspect the refs dreaded working their matches.

As I’m the league treasurer, I may have spoken with the team the most. Every week I’d check in about the league fees, make small talk and try to get to know them.

I had a series conversations with their manager about the problems that were arising around their presence. He was genuinely upset by the tone of the games and remarkably open in sharing his perspective and experience.

It seemed to them that neither their opponents nor the referees could forget that they were the “cop team”. He said that they never had this problem playing in more anglo settings. Although the majority of the guys on the LAPD team are Latino, they seemed only to have problems playing in parts of the city like ours.

It all come to a head towards the end of the season. It was a big game between the LAPD team and Nikys Sports – an unbeatable squad sponsored by the soccer shop across from our field. Nikys has everything – skill, knowledge, experience, strength and speed. IMHO, Nikys are capable of playing some of the best, most entertaining football you’ll see in California.

I didn’t get to see that the night they took on the LAPD. The referee lost control of the match after 30 minutes, and fearing that a player would be seriously hurt, or that the game would descend into a melee, he rightly called it off. I’ve never seen that before.

All of the referees and the spectators I spoke to held the LAPD team responsible for the disintegration of the match. Their game was marked that night by verbal abuse, dangerous and pointless tackles, and just plain rage

The guys from Nikys, normally one of the more ‘emotional’ of the teams in our league, were remarkably calm about it all and went on to finish the season with an almost perfect record.

The day after that disastrous match, the manager withdrew the LAPD from the league. Their departure was inevitable and we were glad they knew this. We talked on the phone, and I learned this wasn’t the first time this had happened. The manager (who’d spent the weekend assisting with the Santa Barbara wildfires) sounded exhausted and depressed. It’d been years since they’d tried playing in a league like ours, because previous attempts had ended exactly this way. He told me, in fact, that Internal Affairs had advised them to withdraw (fearing that if they injured an opposing player, the LAPD might be sued).

In that conversation, I caught a glimpse of the complexity of his position – and the seductive lure of the fantasy we’d all indulged in imagining things could unfold any other way than they did.

People wax romantic about the utopic possibilities generated through football but realities of power, authority and significant histories of abuses of both can’t be wished away.

It is not possible for a cop team to play in one of the most policed neighborhoods in the region, and imagine that we can all forget who they are. The cops don’t forget it. The player stopped and searched as he pulled into his own driveway (“lots of Toyotas in this neighborhood are stolen”) and then issued a citation for making a dangerous turn (!) won’t forget. Nor will the guy with a brother in jail. Nor the guy harassed because of his immigration status. Nor will the guy arrested last week for doing what people do at parties in the Hollywood Hills sans repercussion.

Forgetting is a form of entitlement. Forgetting who and where we are is a luxury. If anglo teams in middle class swaths of beachside communities “forget” they are playing the cops, it’s because they do not experience themselves as “policed.” And if the cops can forget that they are cops when they play those teams, it’s because those guys aren’t the ones they are policing.

I would like to think that football is not a space of forgetting, but of remembering. Remembering who you are, and who is with you — remembering a history not with words, but in movement.

I will stop myself here, before I get romantic.

I was glad to see the cop team leave, and am happier even still to let go of the atavistic scrap of liberalism that overrode my gut feeling about the wisdom of inviting the police into our space of play.

Rudo y Cursi

Rudo y Cursi, Carlos Cuarón’s comedy starring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna is as much about soccer as Footballer’s Wives is. It is less a sports film than a parody of fútbol culture – of everything that the game produces around itself.

But where the British television series marries the drama of the spoiled and fabulously rich characters who grab headlines across the world to the cheesy glamor of a nightime soap like Dallas, the film by the writer of Y tu mamá también marries the texture of ordinary fútbol culture (the weekend warriors, the alternately bored and enthralled cantina audience, the throbbing stands, the pipe dreams of day laborers) to the low-tech histrionics of a telenovela like María la del Barrio.

To everyone’s credit, neither Luna nor Garcia Bernal try to pass themselves off as “real” footballers. The film opens with Tato “Cursi” (Garcia Bernal) taking a penalty against his brother, keeper Beto “Rudo” (Luna). There is no attempt to make this confrontation look like a face off between athletic giants.

The only time we see them acting like wizards on the ball is in obviously manipulated video footage which appears on screen when a character watches them on television. I swear one clip of Cursi dribbling past a tight cluster of defenders looks like a well worn bit from a Maradona highlight reel, and Rudo is shown playing with the sure hands of Petr Cech.

Throughout the film, the game is studiously kept off-camera – often with great comic effect. When Cursi takes the field for his try-out with a pro team the camera stays on the scout and the coach, who negotiate the coach’s cut from the touchline. The back end of the goal’s net can be seen on the margins of the screen, bulging again and again with the ball as Cursi, completely off-screen, scores at will. When we do glimpse Luna and Bernal playing on television, it’s so obviously fake that it’s hilarious. Cuarón’s handling of the sport spectacle points to our readiness to believe that this aging wannabe pop star and his brother, raised on and harvested from a banana plantation, can play for a professional team.

Although some viewers might be annoyed by film’s refusal to pretend that Luna or Bernal can actually play like professionals, this very thing – the amateurishness, the ordinariness of the football playing we do see – is what actually made the film more than a simple comedy.

It is no accident that the film ends with the scout (who narrates it) returning to the dusty fields of no-place, where beat-up amateurs are playing. This – the scrappy patch of dirt on which people play after working themselves to the bone – is really where the film’s heart is located. This space of free play is exactly what everyone is really after, in one sense of another.

After the screening, I asked Cuarón to speak a little about the games he plays with Luna & Bernal and what positons they play – I read somewhere that they’ve had a long standing friendly kickabout. He claimed that they all seem to have pretenses to being strikers. Cuarón asserted he was the only one of the three to have any such talent.

I wanted to ask a more serious question, but a promotional screening hardly seemed the right place to explore the following: One of the film’s subplots has Rudo’s wife working as a distributor for Wonderlife (an Herbalife-like company). This is obviously a dig at Jorge Vergara, the owner of Chivas and president of Omnilife, the Mexican Herbalife. (Vergara, it should be said, was one of the producers of Y tu mamá tabién.) This plotline is plainly intended to comment on this kind of exploitation of the desires of the working poor for economic independence. (This site – in Spanish – surveys those moments in the film which take on the ‘multinivel’ scheme.) At the screening in Los Angeles, I wondered if Cuarón was at all aware of the presence of these multi-level marketing companies in professional soccer in the US, and Herbalife’s involvement with AYSO (see my post on Amway’s sponsorship of the LA Sol). In those pacts made between the companies that own US soccer and their most visible sponsors in this region, we see a cynical avowal of the kind of money to be made off of the soccer fans persistently ignored by mainstream media.

As funny as Rudo y Cursi is, it cuts awfully close to the bone in its parody of the pipe dreams of the disempowered. (Oh, the strained laughter in the Los Angeles audience at Cursi’s first articulation of his desire to go to Texas – where he knows a guy working at a radio station – so he can be a pop star. It’s hard to pretend sophistication in relation to such dreams when you are literally two blocks from the Capitol Records building. And just down the street from Scientology’s sprawling campus.)

Rudo y Cursi (which translates roughly as “tough and corny”) doesn’t pretend that the brothers’ fantasies of easy money are anything but avenues of exploitation. These dreams allow them to be hooked into the schemes of people just slightly higher up on the foodchain, like the “scout” who brings the brothers to Mexico City and plugs them into professional teams where more people can take a cut of their pay. (The film implicitly draws a parallel between this kind of corruption in soccer business and the multinivel Wonderlife.)

Characters dream of making millions playing soccer, of becoming pop stars, or, more modestly, of “owning your own business” (the dream of Rudo’s wife when she signs on as a Wonderlife rep). Nibbling at the edges of the comedy of Rudo y Cursi is the grim reality of precarious living, from which these day dreams provide at least an illusory scrap of relief. On this point Rudo y Cursi approaches satire – no one gets off easy in this story except for the Narco criminal, who swoops in to save the day by marrying Rudo y Cursi’s sister, and providing their mother with the beachfront mansion her feckless sons could never manage to build for her.

Stay tuned for post number two on this film – in which I tackle the film’s homosocial/homoerotics.

Jennifer Doyle writes the blog From A Left Wing: Ruminations on the Game From an Unlikely Player and Fan.

Watching today’s entertaining match, I found myself mulling over the way the word “profligacy” was used in FIFA’s summary of that last game againt Germany:

The African champions dominated much of this match and had enough chances to win a few games, but their profligacy in front of goal – which had already been in evidence in their 1-0 defeat to Korea DPR – once again proved their undoing.

Warning: I am an English Professor by trade. The author meant something like “wasted goal scoring opportunity,” a situation that writers about football find themselves needing to write over and over again, and so one’s vocabulary stretches along with that striker’s foot, and like that prodigal daughter who discards the perfect pass and misses the wide open net, sometimes the writer, too, goes wide of the mark. All that aside, profligacy is an odd word choice. Its first meaning is:

1. Licentious or dissolute behaviour; debauchery; spec. (in later use) sexual promiscuity. [Oxford English Dictionary]

Given the centuries-old racist and sexist traditions that inform representations of African women, it is not a word I would choose. I am sure the FIFA writer didn’t mean to draw from this (the primary) meaning of the word. Better to use the word in a statement like “Manchester United’s behavior off the pitch is a good example of the profligate lifestyle of contemporary footballers.”

Even the secondary meanings for “profligacy” feels inappropriate as a description of how the Super Falcons play:

2. a. Reckless extravagance, prodigality; (also) a wasteful or extravagant act. 2. b. Lack of moderation, excess; great abundance, profusion. [Again, this is from the O.E.D.]

On this point, my objection isn’t political, but technical. In footballing terms, I would say “profligacy” is more apropos of the striker who strikes too soon, of the player who sends the ball too far down the pitch. (In which case, one might tag Brazil for its profligacy in the first match against Germany in which we saw lots of long balls just launched away.)

If the Super Falcons suffered against these teams – the very best teams in the very toughest group in this tournament – it was, I think, more properly because they were too conservative. Which is perhaps counterintuitive, because the Super Falcons play with a lot of style and imagination. But style isn’t the same thing as wastefulness. If that were true, Argentina and Brazil would have the weakest records in football. And England would have qualified for Euro 2008.

A team of goal scorers and a lame back line may be accused of profligacy, in which case we can turn to Tottenham as a fine example. But the Nigerian women’s team plays more like Arsenal, who would never be called “profligate” with the parsimonious Wenger at the helm. We all know the purse strings are kept tight chez les Gunners. And then we have the style of play: lots of jaw dropping short little passes right up to the goal. Spectacular to watch. But, as we all know, eventually the odds go against these genius little moves up the field. Every pass is a pass that can go wrong or be interfered with. Every moment you hold onto the ball is a moment a defender has to catch you. The problem, here, then, is not “letting go” but holding on.

I am wondering if, in the case of the Nigerian women’s team, this isn’t about confidence, and the opportunities a team has to play together. You didn’t see Nigeria, for example, making a whole lot of medium or long passes into space – Germany’s Stegemann scored off of exactly that kind of optimism (“I know she’s on her way, and will be there by the time the ball gets there”), and Marta and Cristiane work off of exactly this kind of confidence in each other (“Marta – draw those three defenders off me, and then cross me the ball!”).

Nigeria’s problem isn’t profligacy – it’s the opposite. A fear of letting the ball go. And with so much riding on them – the only African women’s football team at the Olympics (and, therefore, the only all black team on the tournament’s rosters), who can blame them.

Want to talk about parsimony? Let’s talk about FIFA’s ambivalent support of African football over the years, and then let’s talk about FIFA’s even more ambivalent support of women’s football, and, well, marry those two histories: et voila! You have the special burden of being the only African women’s team allowed to take the world stage. Who can blame them for playing a somewhat skeptical game.

Well, there you have it, my reading of one sentence in a FIFA match report. This is what happens when a feminist English professor becomes a football fan.

Before I sign off for the day, let me just say some things about today’s game. The Super Falcons have super fans! You could hear them shouting, cheering, and singing alongside their own brass & drums band from the start to the finish of the match. And while plainly Cristiane is player of the match, I’d like to give a shout out to Nigeria’s Faith Ikidi who got in some technically perfect tackles and was just a hornet in both of the games I was lucky enough to see. She’s one of the defenders of the tournament in my eyes.

Cristiane’s bicycle kick goal brought tears to my eyes. So amazing, so perfect – she was surrounded by defenders and still got a controlling touch and just sent it over her own body and into the net. I was rooting for Nigeria, but I’m a fan of the beautiful game, and I don’t know what’s more gorgeous & inspirational than a goal like that. (Note the Nigerian player who nearly takes Cristiane’s foot in her face!)

So – here it is:

Brazil-Germany

Brazil held Germany to nil — no small accomplishment. If I remember correctly, the only team to do that in the 2007 World Cup was England (on the absence of a UK squad, see this post). Eurosport France announcers called it “un beau match”, and it was. Lots of action, some great shots and you could feel the tension right from the outset – Germany’s Angerer is a fierce presence in goal, and Brazil seemed intent on letting her know they weren’t afraid of her, so she took a bit of a beating in this game (not with shots so much as with strong challenges for the ball).

I like the look of Brazilian midfielder Formiga — always have (“formiga”: that means ant, right? Her given name is Miraildes Maciel Mota). The lady is not afraid to hold onto the ball: she plays with a lot of confidence and has some nice – actually genius – moves. Everybody talks about Marta and Christiane, but I think Formiga is the glue & the gas. She holds things together and gets everything moving.

Anyway, some highlights include a fantastic flying fingertip save from Brazilian keeper Andreia (Did I imagine that? Because I haven’t seen it mentioned in coverage so far). I was watching in a local sports bar, and they kept turning off the sound – and looked not so amused that I was there. In any case, I’m not sure whose shot that was (Smisek?). This was followed by a speedy counterattack & gorgeous cross from Marta right across the goal mouth to Christiane who sent it over the net with a header as she raced into the space.

Toward the end of the first half I found myself thinking Brazil looked more nervous – sending balls too far up the field, kick and run, except not really. They gave away a fair amount of balls that way, and you rarely saw Germany making those kinds of mistakes.

That said, Marta looked great – her speed is amazing, and it takes as many as three people to contain her. And Christiane is an Amazonian warrior. Over all, as clichéd as it is to say this, Brazil was nicer to watch on the ball. Turning, twisting, playful sole-rolls and crazy little flips – plus, they play chancier football. Lots of speed, quick and surprising movements, and an ability to just pluck the ball from the air – they have a lightness of touch that feels risky from the stands if only because it looks like there are moments when no single player HAS the ball – the ball is moving so fast between them.

Germany are confident – they look almost unflappable. They made very few (no?) obvious errors – few careless or pointless passes. You can feel how well they know each other. Plus, they are sneaky. Don’t let the Germanic-machine-myth let you think that this team is predictable. Prinz in particular is so quick with a shot – she shoots through an open space with a lightening reflex, and she’s hard to read: she looks very, very hard to defend. One pistol shot from the top of the box went just wide before you knew it’d even left her foot.

Brazil looked fantastic (up to a point) in the second half – it felt like the game was mostly played in Germany’s territory. Christiane had a spectacular shot on goal which deflected off of Angerer (very unusual). Defender Costa followed up with a shot that hit the top right corner of the post and bounced just outside the goal area. Nevertheless, they struggled to convert – as usual, no lucky breaks. But, we make our own luck in this game, no? I kept thinking if Germany had these chances, they’d be up by six. But, amazingly, they hardly seemed to get inside the goal’s postal code.

Overall, neither team let the other get all that close to the goal. Brazil had more shots on target, but Angerer really never seemed stretched. The last few minutes were pretty boring as both teams seemed content to let the draw stand. It is not right that they are in the same group.

China-Sweden

China looked fantastic, and not just because the Chinese WNT has the best haircuts. Check out defender Li Jie (on the left) – shortlisted for FIFA footballer of the year in 2007 – or forward Han Duan (on the right) – also highly ranked in the same year by FIFA. These mug shots from the official Olympics team site don’t do them justice. The whole team looked amazing in every single way, and more than half were sporting what I think is called a shag. We see this in England a fair amount – a very punky, scrappy and cool look for the woman athlete who likes her hair and wants to resist the whole pony-tailed “I am not a lesbian” thing.

Based on today’s performance, it would make a lot of sense to see the Chinese team in at least a semi-final match. They more or less ran circles around Sweden – they looked more fit, confident, and like they wanted the win more. And, no doubt, they do.

U.S. – Norway

And, lastly, a word about the US defeat today. Why is it that when the US women lose, they look just plain awful? Great teams lose great games all the time. But the USWNT – which rarely loses ever – seems to only lose once in a blue moon in spectacularly bad games – by giving up own goals, making fatal passes, looking like they just woke up. They didn’t lose today because Norway played brilliantly. They lost because they made two really nasty errors within 90 seconds of each other. Bad communication, a weak and amateurish pass. Not to sell the historic rivals short, but Norway would have been incompetent had they not capitalized on them. They certainly deserve the credit for coming onto the field ready to play!

We see this in the alarming frequency with which women athletes who play soccer and basketball suffer ACL tears. The ACL tear is a very serious knee injury, requiring complex surgery and a lot of recovery time. (Pictured, right: Danielle Fotopolous, the USWNT player who retired in 2007 after tearing her ACL for the third time in 2006.)

The New York Times Sunday magazine recently published an in-depth story about young women soccer players, the injuries they sustain, and the difficulty we have in dealing with them. The article is adapted from Michael Sokolove’s forthcoming book Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports. (Can I just say: I hate that title. It’s so paternalistic! And aimed at the parent-reader, not at the female athlete. How about – Match Fit: Injury Prevention for Young Women Athletes?)

This interesting article is unfortunately wrapped in a sensationalist package. Problematically, Sokolove makes news of the fact that more women are injured as more women play (really?!). The following rhetoric, for example, makes it seem like Title IX is the cause for the increase in 17 year olds needing knee surgery – and as if this were in itself the problem:

This casualty rate [JD: no statistic here, the author just means the number of injuries suffered by a couple of high school teams] was not due to some random spike in South Florida. It is part of a national trend in the wake of Title IX and the explosion of sports participation among girls and young women [No soccer teams = No ACL tears]. From travel teams [these are the club teams not based in the school system] up through some of the signature programs in women’s college sports, women are suffering injuries that take them off the field for weeks or seasons at a time, or sometimes forever. [Unlike men? I mean, of course women suffer career-ending injuries! At least they don't break each other's legs!]

The author then goes on the explain how girls develop differently – e.g. boys gain more muscle, but become less flexible; girls get fatter but more flexible. The author’s language flirts dangerously close to naturalizing girls and women as weaker, more delicate etc (I’m not the only one to spot this slant).

The main issue in this article, however, is women athletes’ specific vulnerability to the ACL tear and the lack of understanding of the specific needs of female athletes – a failure caused not by Title IX, but by the ingrained sexism of medicine and sports culture.

Towards the end of the article, the author interviews Holly Silver, a physical therapist who has developed a knee injury prevention program that should be adopted by all footballers and their trainers.

Silver touches on some possible reasons for the high rate of ACL tears in women athletes: Girls are taught to walk and stand and move through the world differently. We curl around our chests – our bodies become shells, in a way, protecting/hiding everything ‘feminine’ – those bits are sources of shame, abuse, negative attention. [Ed: Found this note on Kickster, about the reception of the first women's game in 1894: "The British Medical Journal offered its professional opinion that 'we can in no way sanction the reckless exposure to violence, of organs which the common experience of women had led them in every way to protect'."]

One of the beautiful things about playing football is it forces women to free their bodies from this shell: You can’t trap the ball with your chest if you are hiding it from the world. You can’t make a good play if your eyes are trained on your feet. You won’t have much touch or footwork if your hips are locked.

Pointing to a player with good form, Silver explains: ‘She moves like a boy….Believe me, that’s a good thing.’

In other words, that girl carries herself like an athlete. Girls are not encouraged to adopt this stance (knees bent, butt low to the ground). And so that posture has become synonymous with ‘boy’. Boys, of course, aren’t born moving this way – and lots of boys don’t carry themselves that way (and are therefore terrorized for ‘walking/throwing like a girl’). The point here is that the social inscription of gender is deep: it may be culturally produced, but it is carved into our spines, and worked into our joints. Girls need to unlearn that stuff – as athletes, they sometimes literally need to learn to walk, and run.

Silver describes the extraordinary consequence of the way that girls inhabit their bodies as they play sports – if you run with poor posture, your running is not only inefficient, it harms your back, hips: all your joints, in fact. As any yoga practitioner will tell you, holding tension in your joints not only makes you less flexible and responsive (slowing your reflexes), it makes you more prone to aches and pains.

My sister coaches girls cross-country and track at Voorhees High School in New Jersey. Her teams have been very successful. Injury prevention is a big part of her program. They work on building up their strength in the gym, on minimizing strain to their muscles, on overall health and well-being. For example, she has the girls keep an eye on their iron levels – anemia is a big problem for teenage girls and young women, and can have a big impact on your development as an athlete. She’s always looking for the latest information on issues like these, and keys these insights to the specifics of her sport and the people she coaches (teenage girls). Not all coaches approach their work this way.

One must recognize gender differences in order to coach/train/treat athletes well. Those differences may be physiological, metabolic, social and psychological.

For example, athletes in general are loathe to report injuries. Reporting injury or medical problems can be even harder for some girls and women. Here are some reasons why:

*We don’t want to seem weak. In a world that reads all physical signs of womanliness as symptoms of the weakness of your sex, getting an injury makes you feel like your body has betrayed you, again.

*Women athletes can be reluctant to own up to the differences gender makes, because admitting to those differences has meant admitting to belonging to the ‘weaker sex.’ Remember: every girl – even today – will be told at some point that girls can’t or shouldn’t play or compete. Every girl hears that girls are weak, that they aren’t tough. Or that playing a sport makes them mannish – i.e. repugnant. To all of this, players say: Screw That, and get on with it. So, not only do we not want to seem weak – sometimes we don’t want to seem like ‘girls’.

*Doctors treat us differently. They don’t listen to what we say about our bodies. They read everything through their ideas about our reproductive system. Our experiences with doctors tend to start off bad, and get worse. We have little reason to trust them.

*We are taught to accept certain physical symptoms as ‘natural’: tiredness (symptom no. 1 of anemia), especially.

*We are reluctant to talk about our bodies – sport is often the only avenue through which we get to talk about our bodies in a way that is neutral, matter-of-fact and empowering. I’ll never forget listening to my sisters talk about pre-race bowel-clearing nerves and the humiliating but often hilarious situations that puts you in. As much as their stories made me laugh, I didn’t really ‘get’ it until I started playing football and found myself at Hackney Marshes trying to act cool as we waited for the mens’ teams to clear out of the damn bathrooms. Never, ever, go to Hackney, ladies, without a roll. Somehow, I associate that kind of frank and humorous talk about the body with ‘jock’-culture. Some of us need encouragement to adopt this kind of attitude.

*Girls aren’t always used to thinking of their bodies as something they can control. Except by starving themselves.

Add onto the above the following:

*Many girls and women play team sports on bad fields/in poor facilities.

*98% of sports stores don’t carry football boots made for women – and that 2 % will carry maybe two kinds. The overwhelming majority of women wear men’s boots, in other words.

*Because women were prevented from playing for so long, coaching/training is modeled after the boys/mens game, and a lot of coaches are not aware of things like the frequency of ACL tears in young women footballers and the conditioning programs which might prevent those injuries.

*We accept the differences in the way that men and women move as ‘natural’, and so do nothing to raise girl athlete’s awareness of poor posture on the field, poor running technique, the importance of being relaxed and having a good stance.

*And, most problematic of all: we don’t listen to girls. We don’t take their complaints seriously. We dismiss their complaints as teenage melodrama or psychosomatic weakness.

That’s a lot of crap to deal with. It’s why teaching/coaching/advising girls and women can be harder – but it’s also why it’s so absolutely rewarding. The things we learn in such settings not only change how we play – they in fact change how we live.

I went down to Barcelona partly to meet Ysra, and to look more closely at the wonderful watercolors she has posted on her site. Last week, she kindly met up with me and my friend, the artist Ming Yuen S Ma.

Yrsa is an independent minded artist who works across a range of mediums – at the moment she is studying documentary film-making. She makes these gorgeous watercolors in the same spirit with which she writes – with an eye to mood, delicate questions of psychology and emotion, with an eye to not only the sublimity of the sport, but to its beauty – which is sometimes quite ordinary, and at other times quite melancholy. The tone of her writing is nearest to Eduardo Galeano’s Soccer in Sun and Shadow – one of my all-time favorite reads.

It was a joy for me to meet a woman similarly engaged by the sport – for those of us whose identities are primarily bound up in art and intellectual life, an absorbing passion in football can be quite isolating. Even though many women play and become fans via their attachment to their fathers, brothers, to the men in their lives, that affection for “their” sport can make us, well, a little bit weird.

Talking Football

Speaking for myself, when I’ve tried to talk footie with guys as a way to, well, talk to them, I’ve come away with the distinct impression that I’ve transgressed some major rule of womanly conduct. A few weeks ago, for example, I sat on a London bound train with my friend Mandy, who is perhaps the biggest Arsenal fan ever (and that is saying a lot). She’s followed the team since god knows when: she is no casual expert on the subject.

Across the isle are two guys: a BBC sports journalist, and an American tourist. They were talking football – and stuck with this subject for a full two hours. They talked about relegation – a fascinating, exotic form of sport brutality to us Yanks. As it happens, I’d just read National Pastime, a comparative economic analysis of major league sports in the US and around the world – focused in part on the relegation system and its economics. I mentioned this to them in a casual, conversational way. They both looked at me, said nothing, and then continued talking as if I’d said nothing.

I suspect a lot of women who love football have had similar experiences – my friend Mandy hadn’t even bothered trying to talk with those guys, and welcomed me back to our discussion with a knowing look. Women really, really love to talk about their sports. It sucks to be shut out of a conversation because you are a girl – and that sense of rejection is made worse when a guy looks at you like you are stupid. Men are fans – when women talk footie we are, well, crazy, or we must be lesbians – or even crazy lesbians.

When men talk footie with each other – when they talk in great depth and with enormous intensity of feeling about other men – it is often not just about footie, it’s about their relationships to each other. It’s a way to be a guy with other guys. A woman who tries to take part in this sorts talk upsets whatever delicate balance is in place that allows guys to talk with and about guys without, well, thinking about guys.

Drawing Football

Back to Yrsa’s work: Most representations of footballers are hyper-heroic, hyper masculine. When Yrsa offers a visual meditation on that ecstatic post-goal moment, she literalizes this explosive joy, as above, in “Encima 2″ (I think that’s ‘Ecstasy 2′ in Catalan). Sports photography tends to amplify the testosterone even in failure, when our sports heroes are made to look more like fallen soldiers than human beings. Not often do we see them look like the big babies they sometimes are, like Messi at the top of this post.

Or take the portrait of Thierry Henry above: he looks weighed down by his own feet, as if he gets heavier and heavier as he gets closer to the ground. If you’ve ever played 90 minutes, you might relate – I know that there are times when the ground feels attached to my feet – like the earth itself is holding me back. I think I see in this as an affection for Henry alongside a mix of hope and a fear of disappointment. But perhaps I project.

The thing that moves me most about these images – about especially “In Training” (right) – is that they are quite plainly made out of love. And that love isn’t filtered by the requirements of a macho/heroic tradition. Maybe because Yrsa’s a woman it’s acceptable to look at and see men in this way, and to paint them with this sort of delicacy. Maybe because she’s half Icelandic/half Catalan – and because she played herself in Sweden until she was 14 (she says she was terrible) – she approaches the subject of Barça and football culture with an eye that is both that of an insider and that of an outsider. I think Barça fans would agree that the freedom with which she looks at this world gives us a glimpse into its beauty and its emotional intensity.

When she’d spread her portfolio out on our table, the waiters in this tapas bar stopped, called others over, and pointed to the portraits – “Oh, that’s Messi, for sure, look at how he holds his head”, and “You can’t miss Thuram there” or they’d shake their head in consternation as they identified the prodigal son: “Ronaldinho.” Our faces lit up with a kind of warmth – the same warmth that animates Roca Fannberg’s images: these are members of the family, and we love them no matter what.

The Guardian reported on an FA statement issued in relation to the Parr Trophy match — which was not, as far as I can tell, sponsored by the FA in any way. The newspaper story, “FA Apologies for 1921 Ban“, offers no direct quotes from an FA statement, raising the question: Was it really an apology?

The Lily Parr Exhibition Trophy Match was part of Gay & Lesbian History Month – it was played between the London Lesbian Kickabouts and Arc-En-Ciel, a Parisian lesbian football team – recreating in spirit the first international women’s game played between England and France. The fact that this celebration of Parr was a part of Lesbian & Gay History month – and that the two teams which played are lesbian feminist teams was not mentioned in Tony Leighton’s telegraphic story (was anyone from The Guardian’s staff there?). I suppose we should be grateful there was any mention of that match, of Lily Parr, and of the rest of action in the women’s game this week in the four paragraph story. But is it really journalism if it’s reporting final scores, and recycling press releases?

The Kickabouts posted the following on their website:

“Lucy Faulkner, Equality Manager at The Football Association said ‘In 1921 The FA requested that clubs belonging to the Association should refuse the use of their grounds for matches played by women with the purpose of raising charitable funds. Furthermore, they stated that ‘the game of football is quite unsuitable for females and ought not to be encouraged’.

“The damage this did to the women’s game is hard to calculate but I am confident that with the support and investment of The FA in women’s football in 2008, the sport will continue to go from strength to strength.’”

There’s another statement on the Kickabout site from Trevor Brooking, director of development at the FA about the growing strength of the women’s game.

The Kickabouts quite rightly list this not as an “apology”, but as a “response”. A response from the Equality Manager is not an apology from the FA Board.

Maybe something went down at that game that has yet to surface in the blogs, like:

“FA Board members attend LGBT celebration of legendary athlete Lily Parr, and apologize for the sexism and homophobia that continue to dominate football culture. Vow to change their own attitudes, to give the FA’s full support to its women players — and kick homophobia out of the men’s game while they are at it.”

ps: For more about Parr, see Barbara Jacobs’s book, The Dick Kerr’s Ladies.