Ladies playing football...?! At Cray Wanderers...?!
Back in 1967, as we all know, the women's game was still in an over-extended hiatus mode thanks to the shortsighted thinking of the Football Association back in the 1920s and subsequent officials of that self-governing association who sat in office until 1971.
I must admit that, my briefest of encounters watching a women's team playing on a pitch in anger is limited to a ladies' hockey match while I lived in deepest, darkest Essex back in the 1980s. On that occasion, the ladies were going at it hammer and tongs. There were very few prisoners taken on that miserably rainy Saturday afternoon in 1986!
I had been invited along to watch the game by one of my work colleagues, who played in goal for her team, I think because she felt sorry for me after the then recent break up of what was later to be known as my first marriage. I can't now remember the final score of that game because I was so mesmerised by how all the players got stuck in, with muddy sods of grass flying about everywhere, as too were the occasional fists and hockey sticks. At times it seemed like I was watching legalised muggings taking place in such serene surroundings. And even the referees - sorry, I mean umpires - seemed to also be happily issuing warnings to players every few seconds.
Yet, after the game, it was as though butter wouldn't melt in the mouths of the players. They all welcomed me into the clubhouse and I seemed to be very popular, but maybe that was because I was the only male person around and they enjoyed the odd harmless tease. I have to be careful here, I know, because times have changed a lot since then and I do understand that things that were acceptable back then may no longer be politically correct now; on the face of it, that's not my fault, life sometimes has a way of tossing curveballs every now and again.
Is the ladies' football anything like that hockey match, I wonder? Maybe not so much of the carved up sods flying everywhere on a G3 pitch perhaps but, are there sometimes fisticuffs involved? Or is their game purely based on Sunday School terms — thou shalt not kill, murder, maim or knock the wind out of an opponent? Thou shalt not run studs down opponents' achilles? And so on.
That hockey game almost 40 years ago now was a real monumental surprise to me that ladies, playing in whatever team sport, can 'put it about a bit'. It certainly showed me that it isn't just the men who can throw their toys out of their prams on the playing fields of England when decisions or actions go against them. And it taught me another valuable lesson, albeit from a spectator's perspective... never get in the way of a hockey stick wielding woman when they are on the rampage!
So I say 'thank you' to Sally Spain, my former workmate, for giving me the opportunity to see that women really can hold their own in sport, whether it be male-dominated or not, and for giving me the appetite to watch other women's team sports go about their game with vim and vigour.
One day I hope to be able to witness first-hand a game featuring the Cray Wanderers Ladies' team. I wonder if I will be in for a bit of an eye-opener...?!
Trevor Mulligan