Posts by giovanni tiso
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Should women be banned from men's football?
That I could just never, ever understand.
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Also, what does that even *mean*? Earn what? Followers? Players? Sponsorship? Cute outfits? How do these measures of achievement work? Who decides? If they get to, say, 63% of the level of support of the men's competition, are we going to graciously allow them equal naming rights? Or what?
Enough young women wanting to play will do nicely, and everything else will flow from there - you don't build a sport from the top. I can tell you that at the soccer club that my son has attended since age five, the more girls there are, the more the organisers are delighted. At year one there are both mixed teams and girls' only teams, and now that Joseph is in his third year there are very few girls left indeed. He does athletics and tennis in the summer, and there is no such dropoff. I don't know why, except anecdotally speaking to his friends it seems that the girls themselves prefer to play other sports or do other things.
In cricket two years ago there were barely any girls at year one in Wellington.
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It's not renaming it. It's calling it what it is.
I just think it's a cop out. And it seems almost condescending to me, demanding nothing of the womens' movement. Do you want the mens' competition, which has been going on since 1930 and has n-times the following, to rename itself? Earn it. At the moment the level of participation, quality of the players, geographical spread, interest among the sports' viewing public are just not there.
Given that *absolutely nothing in any fight for equality works that way*. It's like you want the egg to come first, and I totally know that we're gonna need the chicken.
I'm sorry, but how did it happen in tennis? in athletics? in all the other sports where there is in fact an equivalence? With participation in equal numbers, from the ground up. Go to an athletics facility, to a tennis or volleyball club, you'll see as many women as men. And hey: what about netball! In soccer, rugby or cricket it's just not the case. I don't see young women desperate to play knocking on the doors of a male dominated sport.
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And they might rightly think their tournament deseves to have a name. Or at least be differentiated from the boys.
It does - it's called the women's world cup. And look, ordinarily I'm not at all insensitive to this sort of argument. But the mens' and women's version of football are not even on the same planet at the moment. In much the same vein, I followed and enjoyed the women's cricket world cup but in some games late in the tournament there was literally nobody there. I wouldn't expect them to rename the mens' competition to create some sort of false equivalence.
For much the same reason, I would expect a mens' version of the roller derby to be called mens' roller derby without the womens' version having to change its name.
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Changing practically everything to gender-neutral language is 'comically tokenistic', according to quite a few people. I subscribe to the belief that 'words mean things', though.
To my mind, equality would make sense if there was any meaningful equivalence between the two versions of the sport. I just don't think there is in football, unlike in many other sports. And changing the denomination won't hurry things along either.
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It is a sort of mediocre defeatism that is roundly criticised when we see it in people who get sent to the Olympics
Actually, the olympics *are* supposed to be about taking part. :-)
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Ah, so the name is *officially* sexist. Well, that's all right then.
Come on now, the Mens' World Cup has been around for a few decades longer and the women's side of the sport hasn't developed (yet) in a way that makes the two versions of the sport remotely comparable. It's not like tennis or athletics or volleyball or gymnastics and so forth. So far as I know, apart from the US, there's no country where women's soccer is played at a high level with any following. When that happens, and changing the name of the mens' competition won't be almost comically tokenistic, we can talk.
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Pal, if I came from the land of cattanacio, I would not be getting cheeky about any other country; at the very least, we don't play anti-football.
Ahahaha... oh dear.
Forget dancing about a goalless draw, I may have just danced about making that point :)
That was very nicely done. Back to my original point, though, since 82 (when Hungary potted ten against El Salvador) the world cup structure has done a pretty good job of not letting in absolute minnows who could only but embarrass themselves, I wonder if NZ on current form (and following a path that couldn't prepare them for tougher competition either) could be that kind of meaningfless entry.
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And didn't the All Whites give a European side a bit of a scare recently?
Yes, <cough>. Italy.
Touché.
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I have purchased a device that prevents the TV from being turned on between six and seven pm. Worth its weight in gold.