Who says they aren't kicked?

Who says they aren't kicked?

If you thought the beautiful game was all about the boys, BO and their beer, think again, urges BAGESHREE S. as she discovers that the women's brigade is also out to have a ball

DOUBLE ACT The football merchandising industry has been doing a fantastic balancing act. While it welcomes women to join the hitherto all-male football fan club, it sells skimpy, extra-feminine clothes and other paraphernalia that keep them uber feminine at another level PHOTO: AFP

The first time the woman in our story saw her stuck-to-the-telly husband scream "Ammmmazing pass!", she looked suspiciously at him and 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? So it was with horror and amazement that the woman watched her carefully chosen man transform into a perfect stranger in the first Football World Cup season of her marriage — shedding all political correctness to claim complete rights over the remote, staying up odd hours to watch matches, sleepwalking through the rest of the day, speaking endlessly about Davor {Scaron}uker in a tone that made her further suspicious of his proclivities...

Our story's heroine fits the much-talked-about "World Cup widow" image — a woman grossly neglected by the man (or men) in her life as they begin to eat, drink, sleep, talk etc. etc. football once every four years. But shed the blinkers put in place by the stereotype and you see enough and more women who are as infected by the football fever as any man.

`Real' fans

And mind you, they won't stand any snide remarks about how women know nothing about the "real" game and watch it only to admire the sinewy legs on the field. Writes a livid female football fan in a discussion forum on the Net: "There was something on the local radio station where they asked a load of girls if they were looking forward to football. 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! 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 does not allow her to stay up and watch all the matches, but she does follow the results 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 won't admit it, but somewhere deep down they still think girls are good only for doll games and shopping." In fact, there has been a great deal of debate around the politics of exclusion at play every football season. Melanie Reid in an article in The Herald talks about how religious bans and cultural manoeuvring are constantly at work to keep women out of football. "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, former manager of the Royal Caribbean Cruises. "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 herd of nephews and grandnephews and root for Argentina. "I would have gone to Germany if I had company!" says Iti, who can match the most ardent male football fan in both her incisive analysis of the game and her glint-eyed love for it.

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 here when we consider that women never make big news when they get on to the field? Why hasn't women's football been as big a deal as men's football? So, even as we are saying women love football, are we forgetting to ask why they don't play it, play it enough or not noticed when they do?

These are questions that bother Evelin Hust, the Director of the Max Mueller Bhavan in Bangalore, who grew up playing football with her neighbour's garage door as the goalpost ("much to his consternation"). "A few years ago, the women's football team in Germany beat the United States and won the World Cup. While there is so much hype about the World Cup being played back home in Germany, there wasn't this kind of publicity and celebration when the girls brought home the cup."

These questions become particularly relevant at a time when football merchandising is big business. The industry, interestingly, has been doing a fantastic balancing act — when it welcomes women to join the hitherto all-male football fan club, it does so by selling skimpy, extra-feminine clothes and other paraphernalia that keep them uber feminine at another level. Let's admit that while Iranian women rooting for their country on the field ("Iran's not-so-secret bombs," as they were called) make big news, the picture of the same country's feisty women kicking the ball all the way up to sky wearing hijabs is less attractive. So there are, perhaps, even larger questions about spectatorship and participation that are waiting to be raised.

Rites of passage

But these questions are as yet beyond the woman we began our story with, considering how recent her initiation into this world has been. She is right now in the third World Cup season of her marriage, with several action-packed (some off screen over remote rights and so on) league matches in between. And things have changed considerably since the introductory season. Through a process of education she could not avoid (since husband was unavoidable), she can now tell a free kick from a penalty shootout and knows that Zinedine Zidane is not the name of a pharmaceutical product 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, has even dared ask her if it's Lionel Messi's muscular legs or the ball he is kicking that has her charmed. Perhaps both, we suspect.