UN election monitors to the BBC Sports Personality of the Year ballot, please, as a load of guys simply cannot accept that England goalkeeper Mary Earps won the prize in a public vote. Did these guys vote in the poll? Don’t be stupid. Did they pass comment about the chaotic general election taking place this very week in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where millions are starving and lead lives under permanent threat of extreme violence? One of the candidates, the Nobel peace laureate Denis Mukwege, declared that the “electoral fraud of the century” was currently taking place. In which case, I guess Denis didn’t hear about what went down at Spoty on Tuesday night.
In terms of what did actually happen, it wasn’t hugely complicated, so you’d hope the election monitors would be done and dusted in time to proceed to the DRC. Mary Earps, England and Manchester United keeper, was voted Sports Personality of the Year in the annual BBC contest. That personality in the title is often misunderstood – it’s the old-fashioned word for a well-known person. The award is not an award for personality: Nigel Mansell won it twice. Notably, though, Earps does actually have a personality in that modern sense – she has become hugely popular, despite England’s agonising loss to Spain in the World Cup final, with a big TikTok presence and a whole generation of young girl players looking up to her. Furthermore, a number of women of all ages felt her on-pitch persona simply spoke to them – specifically the famous bit where she saved a penalty kick to keep England in the final, and glossed the moment with an eminently lip-readable “FUCKING YES! FUCK OFF!”
So at least half of that quote has played on the lips for a lot of us when observing the widespread wetting of pants in the manosphere that has attended Earps’s win. Almost no sooner than she’d lifted the trophy, the victory was subject to denigration and ridicule by Joey Barton, Piers Morgan and countless angry keyboard warriors. I think if you’d have asked them what was wrong, they would probably have zoned in on “everything”. The vote was wrong, the BBC was wrong, Earps’s dress was somehow wrong. And a selection of male sports stars who probably don’t give a toss – well, they were the people wronged by all this wrongness.
I think – I think? – the suggestion is that the “woke” BBC has somehow rigged the poll. That is genuinely mad – the BBC fiddling the ballot for one of its most high-profile shows would be a huge scandal. If prominent media figures and outlets do think the BBC did it, then they should certainly get working on that scoop, as it would be one for the ages and win them awards of their own. But if they don’t really think it did it, and are simply having a pop at the BBC because it gets them attention and the corporation would never sue them … then please ask Santa for some self-respect.
By way of a little plot echo, that spot-kick Earps saved in the fateful World Cup final had in fact been taken by Spain’s Jenni Hermoso – another top player plunged into a much bigger nightmare right at her moment of triumph. In the immediate aftermath of Spain’s win, you will recall, Hermoso was grabbed and kissed forcibly on the mouth by Luis Rubiales, president of the Spanish football association, who had been seen minutes before pointing at the victorious Spain players and grabbing his crotch. This set off a chain of events that would lead to the depressing overshadowing of the women’s triumph, the Spanish FA’s open harassment of Hermoso, multiple death threats for her, and Rubiales’s incredibly delayed forced resignation the next month.
Four months on, it’s depressing that many girls who have idolised and been amused by Earps will have clocked the backlash against her doing something as innocent as winning a trophy, led by bitter men older than their dads, who would somehow regard themselves as more enlightened than paleosexists such as the defenestrated former Sky pundits Richard Keys and Andy Gray (but aren’t). However, there is much to be positive about. Tomorrow, Rebecca Welch will become the first woman to referee a Premier League game, as she takes the whistle for Fulham v Burnley. Welch has spent years working her way up from the ground on the referee programme, which will count for absolutely nothing for some – but what a landmark.
In fact, speaking of landmarks, the whole Earps/Spoty controversy this week reminded me of Taylor Swift’s mega-interview with Time magazine this month, having been named its Person of the Year. In this chat, after a year of undisputed global domination, Swift served an ice-cold dish of revenge to Kanye West, who had famously grabbed the mic off her 19-year-old self during an awards acceptance speech, and declared she shouldn’t have won. Fourteen years later, in an article in which Time described Swift as “the master storyteller of the modern era”, she finally spoke of the extremely long and unpleasant saga that followed – but from a position of total triumph.
A useful time to be reminded that there will always be some Kanye who wants to literally or metaphorically grab the mic off you in your big moment, and tell you that, actually, you are shit and undeserving. Women shouldn’t have to get past that – but every day, plenty are showing that you can. It’s the sad men and their dwindling audiences who can’t, but they will end up self-limited and part of yesterday. As Taylor put it so very quotably in her Time interview victory lap: “Trash takes itself out every single time.”
Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
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