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Who says they aren't kicked?

If you thought the beautiful game was all about the boys, think again, the women's brigade is also out to have a ball

THE BEAUTIFUL GAME Football is no longer just for the guys, women too can be as fanatical about the game

The first time the woman in our story saw her stuck-to-the-telly husband scream, "Ammmazzzzing pass!", she looked suspiciously once at him and then at the screen for homo-erotic suggestions. The marriage was preceded by a good three years of courtship, but there are many things you discover only after you begin to live together, right? Such as the madness that comes over the most normal of men every football season.

So, with horror and amazement, the woman watched her carefully chosen man transform into a perfect stranger — shedding all claims to political correctness to claim complete rights over the remote, staying up odd hours to watch watches, sleep-walking through the rest of the day, speaking endlessly about Davor {Scaron}uker in a tone that made her further suspicious of his proclivities...

Catching the 'fever'

But into the third World Cup seasons of their marriage (with several exciting league matches in between) things are a little different. She can tell a free kick from a penalty shoot out and knows that Zinedine Zidane is not the name of a pharmaceutical company and Kaka has nothing to do with the neighbourhood chai shop. She occasionally even manages to say "amazing pass" at the right moments. Husband, the typical "male" that he turns into every four years, is a little unsure if it's Lionel Messi's muscular legs or the game that has her charmed. They've just about crossed the seven-year-itch landmark too, you see. But women don't always need men's aid to catch the football fever. Many catch it just because it's in the air and are abhorred by any suggestion that it's an all-male domain and the women who watch it are doing no more than a bit of male-gazing.

A young football fan writes in a discussion forum: "I was driving home the other night and there was something on the local radio station where they asked a load of girls if they were looking forward to the football and I don't know where they found them but they were all obviously blonde and had the IQ of an ant because they all said: `Ohh I'm looking forward to seeing David Beckham in his shorts, he's lush!' He is?! This is what gives female footie fans a bad name. Why couldn't they have asked some proper female fans? Arghhh! It's ***** annoying! Not all women hate football and the ones that like it don't only like it because you get to see 22 men running around in shorts."

Twenty-year-old Maithri, a student of architecture, feels quite the same way. Her college schedule do not allow her to stay up and start watch all matches, but she does follow the matches closely and manages to watch when big teams are playing. "But it's quite amusing how my male friends instinctively leave me out of football discussion even though I know as much as they do. They still seem to think girls are good for playing with dolls and shopping."

In fact, there has been a great deal of debate around the politics of exclusion that the football season brings in. Melanie Reid in `The Herald' talks about how while religious bans are used in a country like Iran to keep women out of football, the West uses a peculiar cultural manipulation to keep women out. "In Britain, newspapers and magazines publish special supplements telling women how to manipulate their partners during the World Cup, by requesting £500 Mulberry handbags during a penalty shoot-out. While in Iran, women have been banned from entering football stadiums because it is decreed un-Islamic to look at the naked legs and arms of male strangers... So there it is in black and white: handbags or hijabs; a metaphor for gruesome decadence on one hand, and repression on the other... Women are patronised and face barriers — both real and cultural — to stop them entering a male preserve."

"The tendency is for men to say: `You do girlie things, while we get together, drink beer and watch football.' It clearly defines roles and leaves women out," says Iti Mishra, a spirited 65-year-old . "I love football because it's such a complete team sport, I would say unlike selfish games like cricket or tennis where you can play for yourself." Iti is flying out to London to watch the matches with a whole herd of nephews and grand-nephews and root for Argentina. "I would have gone to Germany if I had company!" says Iti who can match up to the most ardent of male football fans in both in her incisive analysis of the game and starry-eyed love for it.

Politics of football

Reading football as a metaphor for power, Reid questions the entire business of keeping women out of "a glut of beauty, athleticism, pride, control and money." She talks at length about how women are caricatured as pretty footballers' wives — high-maintenance, vacuous, vulgar — or as bored parasites, manipulating their dim football-fan partners into giving them mindless luxuries.

But is there an even larger power play at work in the world of football when we consider that women, who make news as cheerleaders and fans, never make it big on the field. Why hasn't women's football been as big a deal as men's football and created the same kind of euphoria ever? So, even as we are saying women love football, are we forgetting to ask why they don't play it, play it enough or aren't noticed when they do?

BAGESHREE S.

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