I’ll make an embarrassing admission before I start: I hadn’t watched any of the Lionesses’ matches until Sunday’s final. So, it was a shock to my flatmates when I found myself sobbing over the collective achievement of a group of women I’d only (shamefully) until this week been familiar with from news articles and friends’ Instagrams.
I could pretend my great surge of emotion was down to the gravity of football history being made and 56 years of hurt (yes, it was the women who finally brought it home), but the truth is it was something far simpler. There in front of me, for the first time I can certainly remember, was a group of women being lauded purely for their achievements, not their looks — and, more importantly, celebrating entirely un-self-consciously about it.
