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You might have noticed that my treatment of Jonas Eidevall's complaints was a touch fanciful last week. It's because I've made the irresistible error of taking a few too many trips into the dark, extreme, conspiracy-riddled corners of the internet lately and the grimness of it is eating into my brain.
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Imagining a radical brotherhood between two Women's Super League managers wasn't enough to clear the rot, though; this week, I couldn't get away from the need to approach the topic a little more directly. Not gonna lie, it is a bit gloomy, but don't worry, cuz I'll be back on Thursday with a sweet hit of women's football cheer.
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To tide you over, though, here are a few fun things that happened in the WSL over the weekend:
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Thanks for reading and I hope you have a wonderful week :)
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People love shouting, these days. Maybe they always have, and before you could shut it out by avoiding the town square. It’s not so easy to steer clear of the internet. It’s where all the stuff you need is, and the fun stuff too.
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It wears you down, I’ve found, seeing people mouth off in a hateful, uncontrolled way. At least when it was just the town square, you had to get off your arse and be there, first, rather than just idly tapping out slurs from the comfort of your couch. Now everyone’s at it all the time. Insults for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Miserable life.
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I thought it was a bit of a laugh when Joey Barton first started yapping about women being shit a few weeks back. It’s easy to ignore a lunatic discrediting himself with his own ridiculousness. I was cross that people were writing about it, talking about it — this guy wants starving out, surely. That was naive. Not everyone thinks like me. It would be boring if everyone thought the same thing. But it would be much more peaceful if everyone was thinking about raising other people up rather than tearing them down.
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You can ignore one raving lunatic but hordes of egged-on ranters and parroters are a much more frightening prospect. Again, perhaps naively, I used to think that tweets were hot air, quickly muted, not worth much. Talk is cheap; it’s what we do that counts.
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But look at what Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has done since taking post. All as good as forgotten the moment he casually weighs in on a flammable debate. He didn’t incite transphobia in the presence of a mother grieving a trans child out of pure spite; it’s just that Esther Ghey’s feelings are worth less than the chatter he could generate by publicly disregarding them.
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Speaking on the Today programme, Nick Robinson said that the incident highlighted how “ordinary people… can be deeply affected by the rows that energise politicians and energise people on social media. There are people at the heart of this.”
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The internet was designed to connect the world, but we all suffer from the illusion that we know each other better for it, and the opportunity to speak, loudly, about things we know little about. If I only had the Daily Mail to go off, I wouldn’t see trans folks as the brilliant people I know them to be — but then, I’ve never taken the time to get to know a transphobe, either. The pandemic made thinking outside of our bubbles even harder; everyone judges everyone before having a conversation, and all the shouting makes such conversations less possible.
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I see it happen most Sunday afternoons. Each player who kicks off brings another furious teammate or opponent into the fray. Like dominoes. From the bench at the weekend, I threw a louder ‘oi’ than I ever imagined could pass my lips when Farsley Celtic’s number 7 pushed my pal over. It felt right, but shouting back solves nothing. It leads to shoulder barges which inspire insults which make spitting a possibility, and if none of us ever took a sec to check ourselves the game would collapse into nothing like the fun that sport was invented for.
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When the world feels bleak, I’ve always been grateful for the escape of Sunday afternoons, for the BBC Sport app taking me off Twitter, for chasing the news headlines with the sports bulletin. But while sport has never been apolitical, it feels scarier these days.
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Sport is supposed to be fun but not even parkrun is safe from discourse about identity. Like Barton’s tweets, the bid to exclude trans people from a community event whose purpose is to provide a safe space for anyone and everyone to exercise seemed like a joke. But the pace and fury of online discourse led parkrun to stop publishing run times on their website. They say it had nothing to do with the gender critics’ tantrum but I’ve stopped believing that a barrage of tweets amount to nothing, now.
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Last month, a live stream of Leeds United Women’s thrashing of County Cup minnows Brighouse Town Juniors was taken down along with all evidence of a magnificent performance by the Whites after the comments were overwhelmed with abusive messages. Last week, at TSB Towers, we weighed up the risks of putting new Leeds United journalist Nancy Froston in the firing line by bringing her on the podcast before she had the chance to prove that she isn’t the useless football-ignorant woman that many suspect her to be. In both instances, the trolls get their way.
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If there wasn’t any need to protect ourselves, I probably would have fought a bit harder when security stopped me swinging for the man who groped my sister in a nightclub on my 24th birthday. Shouting back can make things worse — but the solution to hatred cannot be silencing the voices which provoke it.
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Got answers? Please, give me a shout by emailing [email protected] or hitting reply at the top of this email.
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Won with the wind
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Ponytails flapping like flags, goalkeepers’ knees knocking at deadballs. “It’s not always easy to come to the north east and play football,” said Olivia Smart.
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