The similarities were disconcertingly neat. Lauren James and David Beckham, both in their early 20s, scoring goals for club and country, received a red card for a petulant, off-the-ball incident midway through a tense World Cup second round match. The only difference has been the public and media reaction. While Beckham was vilified for months, James has swiftly been forgiven.
Partly, this can be attributed to a non-trivial element of knockout football: whereas in 1998 England lost to Argentina and were sent home, on Monday the Lionesses somehow beat Nigeria thanks to a decisive penalty from Chloe Kelly that, but for the net, may have reached escape velocity.
It also stems from a changed media landscape. Newspapers — perhaps led by their readers — have concluded that there is less mileage in a concerted effort to destroy the mental health of young people, just because they can kick a football and are well remunerated for it. But this doesn’t quite explain everything.
While Beckham was vilified for months, James has swiftly been forgiven
Some of the reaction to the James red card has been puzzling. There has been criticism, of course, yet other commentators have leapt to her defence, not condoning it, but also calling the stamp on Nigeria’s Michelle Alozie’s “completely forgivable” or “not a violent act”.
The issue here isn’t that James, a month shy of her 22nd birthday, ought never be forgiven. Alozie herself already has. Nor that it was an act of horrific, life-changing violence. But it was a senseless red card, at a vital moment, that on the balance of play really ought to have cost her side a place in the World Cup. Why the reticence, in some parts, to say so?
It still feels as if certain sections treat women’s football with kid gloves. That we mustn’t criticise too harshly — either a mediocre team performance or an individual moment of madness — because it might damage the game. Or because misogynists will use it to say “I told you so, girls can’t kick straight.” Yet the idea that we can’t grow the sport unless we pretend everything is fine does a tremendous disservice to world-class athletes.
Part of this stems from the delayed development of the game, a deliberate act of vandalism perpetrated by the English FA, which banned women’s football in 1921, essentially for being too popular. Compare this with a sport in which women have been established for many decades, such as tennis. It is not that Billie Jean King, Martina Navratilova and Serena Williams didn’t have to fight for equality in money and respect, or that the fight is not still ongoing.
But a disappointing Wimbledon final or an ill-tempered encounter with a line judge need not be brushed under the carpet in order to ‘protect’ the game. The product speaks for itself. And so too does women’s football. No one who was at Wembley in July last year to witness England defeat Germany to win the Euros, or who was watching it from behind the sofa, would need persuading of this.
I don’t know when the Women’s Super League will see its first million-pound player, let alone £200m. But we will be closer to another kind of equality when we drop the queasiness around criticising female players for playing as badly, or acting as unthinkingly, as the men.
England were poor against Nigeria. James’s stamp was calamitous. Both facts made victory all the sweeter.
Taylor’s in a time and place for me
The opening bars to Welcome to New York, the lead-off track to Taylor Swift’s zenith, 1989, takes me back to somewhere quite specific. Not a place I’d ever wish to spend the night (again), but harmless enough as a daydream. Music is the most personal of mediums in that way.
So it is with a mild shrug that I greet the news that 1989 (Taylor’s Version) will be released in October. I have no ideological issue with the re-recording drive — it’s hardly prevented her from pumping out new records or touring the world. And regaining control of her music following the sale of the master recordings seems fair, notwithstanding the windfall it produces.
It’s just not for me. Swift’s songs are timeless, but the recordings are time and place-specific. I’ll stick with OG 1989 — as the first track goes, “you know you wouldn’t change anything”.
