IT HAD TO HAPPEN
When various media outlets started giving more than a cursory token nod to women’s football a few years ago, quite a few men seemed to presume it had become compulsory to watch the game and made it clear they were unhappy with having this sporting aberration “rammed down our throats”. A woman’s place was elsewhere, they crudely insisted, not contesting World Cup quarter-finals in packed stadiums in front of 75,784 fans who had presumably wandered in by mistake. That was the official attendance at England’s match against Colombia on Saturday in Sydney, a city that has long been synonymous with its Opera House, Bondi Beach and bizarrely strict pub door policies, but until this tournament had kept its huge population of football-mad, hostile Colombian diaspora largely under wraps.
