It is one of the most reliable features of modern life that any piece of news, no matter how banal, must inspire an instant and violently polarised public response.
In its simplest form this boils down to the standard opposition of snowflakes and gammons. These are familiar, comforting categories by now. The snowflake is cloyingly pure, but also fragile, wet, melty and cold. The gammon is empurpled, stubborn, salty and thick with gristle. Both come with their own discrete areas of concern, left versus right, old versus young, furiously angry versus angrily furious.
This can lead to confusion when positions are less certain, when unhelpful things like nuance, balance or empathy start to intrude. What about those of us who sit unhappily in-between, exhibiting only the most despised characteristics of both extremes? What if you’re old but also fragile? What if you’re weak, fey, irritating but also fat-headed, red-faced and stubborn?
What if this leaves you as a kind of hybrid, a snow-ham, a gammon-flake, lost in the salty pink sludge of no-man’s land? Which camp to follow, what views to hold?
It is an uncomfortable place to be in a world full of certainties. And it was there again at the weekend in the comments from Graeme Souness on Sky Sports after Chelsea v Spurs, that weird interlude where suddenly Souness was talking about the man’s game, about men going at it with men, about getting our game back; stuff that, even as he was saying it, made you want to reach into the screen and place a hand over his chiselled, grizzled jowls, to feel the iconic abrasion of the Souness moustache, and to say No, Graeme, this is not it.
This is not the incredibly ill-thought-out hill you should be so ready to die on. Even if you do seem incredibly keen on the basic idea of dying on a hill.
I don’t know what Souness was trying to express. I am biased in his favour because I admired him as a footballer (for those who weren’t there: he was a genuinely A-list central midfielder) and I find him watchable and very funny as a TV pundit.
What does he look like, coiled in the corner of your screen? Like a disappointed lion. Like he’d fight you over the last refrigerated triangle of Primula cheese at a motorway hotel breakfast buffet. And this is his key quality, a muscular puritanism, an adherence to old Saxon poetry tropes of the warrior creed, of men who say things and then do things, where every game of football is in some sense the Battle of Maldon.
This requires something to rail against. As a result it has led him into some weird places, not least his wrong-headed preoccupation with Paul Pogba, who is tall, but also skilful rather than physically dominant, and thus very difficult to process.
And yet, for all that, I really don’t think Souness was trying to say women shouldn’t play football, or that women’s football is inferior. Even if this was, in its basic form, literally a man saying women’s football is inferior.
I think what he was trying to express, poorly, was his enthusiasm for letting the game flow, a lust for extreme physicality, and his own obvious nostalgia for the world of his youth, a place where Wulfstan is always the noblest and bravest of all warriors, still out there defending the bridge from the Vikings.
He used the wrong words and did so very carelessly. If he had said “this isn’t the under 11s” or “this isn’t badminton” it would have been OK, the same point made without pointlessly alienating many of his viewers. It might have been OK if he hadn’t then refused to back down and admit he had used the wrong words, but then his entire sense of self, the Sounessness of Souness, is built on not backing down. And yes this is an extended benefit of the doubt. But there is a strange kind of honesty in those simple warrior values. I just can’t believe Souness wouldn’t love watching women kick the crap out of each other just as much.
So, that’s that then. Man rages, inaccurately, at the sky. It is the oldest of stories. But there is another element here too. The thing is, Souness did actually raise an interesting point, intentionally or not, something sport will surely unravel a little more coherently in the next few years.
It is at this point that the flakes start to bleed pink, and something a little vague and unresolved starts to intrude. What Souness was saying, essentially, is that he enjoys watching extreme aggression. And that the most extreme physical aggression is, more often than not – and with all due exceptions – extreme male aggression, expressed, still, in extreme male terms.
It is hard to talk about this without sounding like bad Hemingway after six quarts of sherry, musing on the muscular buttocks of the matador, the nobility of blood, bare forked man confronting his own rigid manly death staff.
But sport is still essentiality male-filtered. These disciplines were codified at a time when cliched ideas of male strength, male collisions, male manliness were an unquestioned ideal.
The language of sport, its customs and behaviours, were minted that way over the next hundred years. A lot of this is simply styling and mannerism. But the thing that Souness could only express as male, that element of pure aggression remains a brilliant, vital ingredient, something to cherish and preserve.
And who knows maybe Souness, in his unprogressive way, was actually saying something deeply progressive here. If there is one thing I would personally adjust in the way women’s sport is presented, it would be ditching the idea that it has to be an inspiration, to break down barriers, to make nice and bring together, rather than simply existing as theatre, the way the men’s game does.
The future is surely in there, just a small step sideways from the Souness screed, a world where Sarina Wiegman is wheeling Martina Voss-Tecklenburg around by the post-match handshake, where Jill Scott is telling pricks to fuck off, not just once, but repeatedly. Where women are also giving it to women in the most womanly of women’s games; and where we all, Graeme included, get our game back.
