Are the Doncaster Belles being punished for their history? Or for the history of women's football?

Moira Lovell, "John and Precious" from Stand Your Ground
Doncaster Rover Belles players and their coach

The unfairness of discrimination can be so lacerating, so outrageous that you hesitate to speak directly to the experience of it. Once you start, you are sucked into a tornado of totally justified and completely disabling paranoid thinking. Who wants to count the ways in which the game is fixed, ruined at the outset? That's the pall that the English FA is casting over the women's game it claims to want to develop.

At the start of this season, the FA announced its plans to relegate the Doncaster Belles from its "Super League" no matter how well they perform.* This is so that they can make room for Man City's women's club, which finished 4th in the "Premier League" (the 2nd tier league in the women's system). Man City is to be promoted no matter how poorly they do.

To say that this would not happen to a men's side is to say the obvious. That complaint doesn't say much. It is perhaps more accurate to say that this decision represents an attempt to map the lack of integrity of the men's game onto the women's game in the name of the latter's "development" - as if one could squeeze grassroots football out the women's game overnight and replace it with the hollow commercialism of the men's game.

The FA believes that Man City is a better product than the Doncaster Belles, and that fans are satisfied with the fact that women play, and so it doesn't matter who plays on what team or how well.

The Doncaster Belles have played in the top division in women's football for 22 years. They are founding members of the National League (the FA's first women's national division), and completed the 1991-1992 inaugural season without conceding a single game. Why did the Doncaster Belles enter the first season of FA-sponsored women's football as the overwhelmingly dominant club? Because they'd been playing since 1969: they were founded before the FA allowed women to play. They are, in fact, England's longest continuously operating women's club. (For a good portrait of the club, read The Popular Stand's The Belles Toll.)

The Doncaster Belles are a model organization: In 2009, they established "The Belles for the Community" initiative, integrating the women's club into "community, social, health and educational services." They are (according to their website) the first women's club in Britain to do so - in doing so, they honor the roots of the women's game as not only grassroots, but communitarian.

In early years of the women's game in England (1919-1921), clubs raised money for the community - for injured and unemployed veterans, for war widows, and eventually in some cases for striking workers. People knew that in turning out to watch women's football, they were supporting each other - so they turned out in huge numbers and raised an astonishing amount of money from communities with few resources to spare. Barbara Jacobs, in her must-read history of the women's game, speculates that the communitarian orientation of women's game was one of the reasons behind FA's 1921 ban. She writes:

For the FA, the psychological reason was that women's football was something they were powerless to control. It has sprung up as the spontaneous expression of free-spiritedness by the lower orders, in a totally different way from that in which men's football had developed. Men's football had initially been a game for gentlemen which had only later, after its control by the FA, turned into a rough-house performed for the working classes by the working classes, which they and they alone paid to see while the owners and investors pocketed the proceeds....But in women's football there were very few rich men, just a lot of common factory women. There was no League structure, no hierarchy,no fees paid to accountants, no skimming off dividends, no affiliation to a professional body. Women's football was random and organic.... It was out of control, and it was a bad example to set the nation as a whole, which was already rebelling against the old power structures.  

If women's football, which had shifted slightly from its factory roots and begun to establish itself as a sporting means for raising huge sums of money for charity,were to continue, how long would it be before the man in the street...started to ask - where does the money raised in men's football go to? (Jacobs, The Dick, Kerr's Ladies, 166)

Jacobs's analysis of this history is important. Sexism does not stand alone. The FA did what it could to kill the women's game in the 1920s not because women weren't suited to football (that's the official reason they gave), and not because the women's game was corrupt (ironically, that's another reason they gave). The FA did what it did because the women's game was organized differently. It represented a different cultural possibility. This was expressed in the game's material structure - in particular in the way that the people organizing the women's game approached the money. Money, in the women's game in those years, was meant to circulate - it was not to be gathered by a single owner or set of investors. The women's game was a means for taking care of each other.

I see the echo of this moment in the FA's current behavior towards the Doncaster Belles - otherwise why single out the most stable club, with the best playing grounds and with the most articulated relationship to its community for this treatment?

I've resisted thinking about this (I'm writing this months after the FA announced its intentions) because the idea of it is just so painful. As one fan put it to a journalist reporting the story for The Independent:

Doncaster have one of the best stadiums in the [Women's Super League]...Arsenal play at Boreham Wood, Birmingham in Stratford-upon-Avon, Liverpool at Widnes. We have a 15,000 seat stadium. We have eight England internationals...we could lose all these players.

The Independent rightly called the story a "relegation scandal." The Doncaster Belles are appealing this decision - the stakes are high. Not just for the Belles, but for every fan of English football. If the FA feels it can go after the integrity of the women's game, perhaps it feels it must, because the integrity of a side like the Doncaster Belles throws the state of the men's game into such stark relief.


*For US-based readers unfamiliar with the relegation/promotion system that defines this sport: Teams that finish at the top of their division are promoted and teams that finish at the bottom are relegated to the next division down.

Kelly Smith: It's Always the Quiet Ones

Kelly Smith celebrates a goal, her magic foot and the shoe it was in.

When you teach you learn pretty quickly that the very smartest and most interesting students are often quiet. Some are painfully shy and intense listeners. Some only talk when they think they have something valuable to contribute and have a very the bar high when it comes to their sense of value. Some feel like their own interests are so out of step with everyone else they just keep their mouths shut. Some keep their mouths shut because they don't want to stand out.

When you teach, you meet these students in their writing. It's one of the profession's real pleasures. These students teach me to never accept the surface. To expect deep waters, but also to never assume that I know where those deep waters lie.

Kelly Smith's memoir is the absolute opposite of Hope Solo's. Some of these differences can be chalked up to those of a keeper and a striker, and others can be read as the differences of American and English attitudes towards self-disclosure. (One is abundant with it, the other refuses it.) But the differences between their books don't end there.

Hope Solo barely touches on her game in her memoir. The book's focus is on her family, and on the challenging social dynamics of a team living under the spotlight. We know the name of her boyfriend and are given the outline of the development of their relationship. Her friends and the coaches who have supported her get shout-outs. We do get a peek into the USWNT run in the 2011 World Cup, and Solo outlines the physical struggle of her recovery from a shoulder injury that was far worse than most of us realized. But these things are not really at the heart of the narrative. A Memoir of Hope is personality driven. If Solo's memoir is a good read it is because it mirrors the outspoken wild card public persona we already know.

The title of Footballer: My Story pretty much says it all. Smith's book is 100% centered on her relationship to the sport. Where Solo's book opens with a broad portrait of her home town, her parents, with the landscape in which she grows up, Smith's book opens with an image of one of the world's greatest players as a kid with a ball at her feet. We learn that she would imitate moves that she saw on Match of the Day, and practice them using video tapes of the week's highlights.  The narrative sticks with this tight focus of Smith on the ball right to the end. 

Footballer: My Story does chronicle Smith's personal struggles, and they are significant:

• When she grew up there was no real women's football culture to speak of in England. This is the source of her often cited complaint that the women's game in England in the 1990s "was a joke."
• Like many of the great international players, she played with boys until she was kicked off the team. She grew up being welcomed into the game (invited to play with the boys) and exiled from it.
• Like most international players, she had no future in the sport to imagine for herself - she wanted to be a professional footballer, but for English girls this dream was a delusion. The vast majority of English women players lose access to training before they turn 18. Even now the Women's Super League is more semi-pro than pro. And it is significantly more professional than anything anyone had ever heard of just ten years ago. 
• She was scouted and recruited to play in the US. This was dumb luck. With relatively little awareness of what it would mean, she enrolled at Seton Hall in New Jersey and plunged into deep culture shock. 
• She suffered from crippling social anxiety which she self-medicated, becoming a full-blown alcoholic in her twenties. 
• She suffered one serious injury after another. Torn ACL, broken leg, fractured leg - and has come back from each. 
• Unlike the USWNT, England has been a serious underdog in international competition for years. Under Hope Powell's leadership the team has been climbing a serious mountain. They've suffered some agonizing, cruel defeats on the world stage. When it comes to trophies and medals, they are far more familiar with failure than they are with success. 

In short, Kelly Smith has worked hard, suffered, and gotten through it and over it. In spite of the list I've given above, the book is not a litany of complaints. Far from it. Smith is clearly a person with an enormous reservoir of strength. If she shares one quality with Solo, it is a certain stubbornness. A refusal to hear "no." An obstacle is not a roadblock. It's something to be hurdled. 

Her narrative is also not sappy, or sentimental. It's remarkably reticent. We never learn, for example, why Smith was so afraid of speaking in front of people, or why she felt so intensely alone and isolated that she crawled up inside a bottle. This book is no confessional. On this point, it feels remarkably English - she makes absolutely no excuses for herself. Even as we learn of relationships that have sustained her, she never tells their story - Smith comes off as very private. This leaves her somewhat of a mystery as a person.

Smith's discretion compares interestingly with Solo's openness, as do her struggles with social anxiety.  Solo is what the corporate world diagnoses  as "non-joiner" - a person not so good at small talk, who prefers time alone to team-building exercises, prefers the company of a handful of people she trusts than that of people she doesn't know and who don't know her. Solo does not lack for confidence - in fact her  confidence perhaps grounds her decisions about how she socializes.  The Solo we meet in her memoir knows what she needs.

Footballer: My Story suggests a very different kind of isolation. Smith struggled with profound loneliness and depression. Real despair - and it seems that for a long time this was kept hidden from the people around her. Fortunately, it wasn't hidden for too long: Powell, her teammates and her family helped her get on solid ground. Where Solo and co-author Ann Killian give us detail about her background in order that we understand Solo's lone wolf, controversy-provoking style, Smith and her co-author Lance Hardy draw a careful line around Smith's private life.

The refusal to disclose much about herself off the pitch makes room in Smith's autobiography for lots of writing about her development as a player and a teammate. This book will teach readers a lot about the England women's team. It will also introduce readers to the basic state of European women's football. You'll also get a fantastic glimpse of Hope Powell's coaching, which is no small thing in and of itself. Smith devotes a full chapter to Powell - the whole book might just be a long thank you to the woman that Smith credits with saving not just her career, but her very soul.

The book starts of slowly and awkwardly - somehow its writing seems to mirror Smith's battles with social awkwardness, picking up pace as she gets deeper into her career and maturity. The book is most comfortable inside the game: the chapter on England's loss to France in the 2011 World Cup quarterfinals is as heart breaking as the match itself.

When you watch the game as much as some of  us do, you really want to know what it feels like to play at that level. Sometimes it is a joyful experience and sometimes it is absolute physical and emotional agony. The game started off with a "bright start" but soon France put the pressure on them and then kept it up. Smith's team scored a goal against the run of play at 58 minutes. The French really piled it on then. "We knew we were in a match," Smith writes. Her ankle had been sore from the start, and the pain mounted with each passing minute.

The longer the game went on, the more pressure the French put on our goal. The pain in my ankle, too, was mounting as time passed. 

At one stage I remember looking up at the clock on the scoreboard - I think we were about seventy or seventy-five minutes into the game, and we had the lead - and I thought to myself 'Just get through this.' 

We were keeping them at bay. We were playing so well defensively that I thought they couldn't score. Our backs were against the wall, admittedly, but I felt so confident in our back line and goalkeeper. But the clock seemed to be going very slowly and as a result our place in the semi-finals seemed so near and yet so far away. The second half seemed to be lasting forever.

Powell made the last of her substitutions. Smith didn't have a chance to signal how much pain she was in. Powell subbed in for defenders on the basis of a miscommunication. With three minutes left France broke through the back line and the game went into extra-time. By this point Smith could scarcely put weight on her foot.

As the French ran around, screaming heir heads off in delight, it struck me there and then that I would now have to play on for another half an hour. 

France kept up their attack, dominating possession. England held on for dear life. Smith writes, "I couldn't see us getting a goal. So, without thinking about it, I started to will the game to end. I wanted penalties."

Penalties they got. Smith took the first and scored. But they went out anyway. This is the kind of story that fans want: How was Smith feeling in the middle of that firestorm? What happened with the penalties? (Few players volunteered, this because a major talking point in the press.) What happened with that substitution?

Many people wrote after that match that England's women are like the men - and that English players need to practice penalties more than they do.  Smith's recollections and thoughts on this whole episode are frank and sobering:

I would like to take this opportunity to say that we practiced penalties after virtually every training session in Germany. I would also like to this: you can practice penalties all day long and it makes no difference to what will happen on the day when it matters.

You can't prepare for the stadium, the crowd, the pressure. How can you plan for who is going to be on the pitch after ninety minutes, or who is going to be fit or injured? It's impossible....

Regarding the comparison with the men's side:

Of course the England men's time have had a torrid time of it in the past, going out of the 1990 World Cup, the 1996 European Championship, the 1998 World Cup, the 2004 European Championship, and the 2006 World Cup on penalties. That is quite a list. By contrast, England's women's team have gone out of tournaments at that stage against Sweden in the European Championship final in 1984, when the team was still not officially recognized by the Football Association, and against China in a competition that didn't really matter to us, the Algarve Cup in 2005. The defeat by France in the 20011 Women's World Cup was only the third occasion. It's hardly an epidemic.  

It's a good point. I appreciated hearing this from her. I also appreciated her account of watching the World Cup final with her teammates in Boston, and then what it felt like to see Breakers teammate Aya Sameshina return to the squad with the medal. ("I saw the medal but I couldn't touch it.")

Soon the Breakers suspend play and the WPS folds. She writes, "With the problems that have occurred over the years, I think it's understandable for me to feel that there will always be some kind of issue with women's football [in the United States] at the highest professional level. Let's just say that I don't think things will ever run smoothly. It's a shame, but that's the way it seems to be."

It's hard to argue with her on that score. Smith's book gives us a glimpse of the difference that the England makes, as a context for developing the game. The system has strengths and weaknesses. Club training isn't as frequent and developed as it is in the US. But the FA is building its league system slowly and carefully. The FA had better luck with television contracts until recently. The national team's growth ties directly into the league's visibility. The book left me optimistic about women's football in England - and wondering how long it will be before it tops Sweden and Germany as the destination for the world's best.

There is, of course, a lot more to the book - and to Solo's - than I've been able to describe in these two posts. But of the two, Smith's will tell you a lot more about the experience of the match and the state of the game than will Solo's.

The tone of Smith's book suggests to me that if you sat next to Smith at a party, you could probably talk with her about the game for hours. She might be quiet at the start. She might not be the most gregarious person at the table, but once she gets rolling she can hold your attention just as well as she can hold the ball. Sorry for that last analogy, but I couldn't resist it. If you want to buy Footballer: My Story, you can find it on Amazon. And there's a kindle edition. 

The Weight of History: Great Britain & Brazil play at Wembley

According to the FIFA preview for this event, Team GB's game against Brazil will be the first women's football match ever played at Wembley.*

I'm a big supporter of Team GB. They have great players - just the midfield features Jill Scott, Rachel Yankey, Fara Williams, Anita Asante. There's Kelly Smith, Ellen White, Alex Scott - all fantastic and very experienced players. England (Team GB is England w/ a few players from Scotland) beat Japan 2-0 in the World Cup. They beat the US in a friendly a few months before that. They lost to France in the quarterfinals on penalties. (That left us with a lot to talk about as manager Hope Powell complained to the press that too few of the players wanted to take the penalty shots. The media storm created by that was perhaps even worse than that created recently by Solo. There was talk of Powell's retirement from the England team.)

Team GB is a legacy team. If within the men's game there is a romance to playing for the countries that "invented" football, the women who take the field at Wembley tomorrow honor a far more heroic past. For fifty years of women were banned from football pitches. Where at the end of WWI, people turned out in huge numbers (far exceeding attendance at women's league matches in England and the US) by the 1970s (when the game was decriminalized) it was a nearly universal object for derision.

But off the grid, behind that history of prohibition and hostility women played on. If the FA banned women's football and created a culture in which the idea of women playing the game seemed ridiculous, they also created a football underground. The ban produced a punk-rock oppositional zone for gender non-conforming girls and women to find each other. By this I don't mean that women footballers circa 1970 were gay punks and labor organizers. But rather that the history of women's football is that of a counter-culture - far more powerfully than is true of the men's game, even given its working class roots. How many men are bullied and harassed off of football pitches, for being men? (Histories of women's teams through the 70s and 80s can include stories of women being physically assaulted for taking pitches - telling men to get off the field you've paid for could be dangerous.)

I just love the women of those generations and the legacy they've given us - a legacy of outspoken, pig-headed, delusional figures like Hope Powell - who fought her way through circumspect and hostile boys, proved herself amongst them, played for women's teams through years when doing so was seen as a ridiculous waste of time, then slugged it out with the FA. As she put it in an interview, "I will not be bullied."

And she won't take anything less than that level of determination from her squad.

Brazil

My emotional attachment to this team is complicated. They have contributed some of the most exciting matches to the recent history of the women's game. It has been generally true that you can count on Brazil for entertaining football - technical skill, theatrics, gamesmanship, emotion and drama. The women's team has everything the men's team is famous for. Except money and institutional backing.

It was easy to root for them when they played Germany - when they were the underdog, the talented side proving themselves to an indifferent CBF (the organization managing the sport in Brazil). They have pleaded for help from the CBF for years. In 2007, while at the Women's World Cup, the team's players wrote and signed a letter of complaint to the federation. They complained that not only was the team under-supported, the CBF routinely failed to direct awards money to the team. There was no clarity regarding financial support for players, and no consistency in material support for the team's training.

They thought things would improve when they won a silver medal at the 2004 Olympics. They gave the heavily favored USWNT a run for the money (Abby Wambach who put the game away in its waning minutes). Given their outstanding performance there, the Brazilian thought maybe things would get better for them. But their future success would only highlight the potential that was going to waste. Year after year.

At the 2011 World Cup, the team went into competition wearing the uniform for the men's side. That's as big a symbolic statement as a federation can make - they do not order team kits specific to the women's side (and so their shirts had stars for all the World Cup trophies won by the men). The women complained publicly about these problems in 2007. Little has changed. Lost in reports regarding the profound corruption at the highest levels of Brazilian football is the impact of this lack of professionalism must have on the women's team. It's dire.

Brazil's women ask their federation for support, holding up a banner at the 2007 Women's World Cup award ceremony.

Imagine you compete against the US and Germany, year after year you show that you have the ability to conquer teams with far better training.

The team's semifinal win (4-1) against Germany in the 2008 Olympics remains one of my favorite viewing experiences. In that match they broke Germany's defense. Better teams (including the US) had tried and failed. It was a very physical game, but it was a game that also featured fantastic technical ability and a certain ruthlessness. Both teams tried to knock their opponent out of rhythm. Brazil played like a real team. Their first goal was a telepathic collaboration between three of the game's absolute best: Formiga, Marta and Cristiane. They never connected like that in the final, though. The USWNT took all the wind out of their sails, and took the trophy with one goal scored in extra-time.

Imagine that over and over again you find yourself inches from a trophy. You have not just one of the best players in the world on your squad (Marta), but two (Cristiane) - and a host of others who are absolute all-stars (Formiga - playing in her fifth Olympics). But you never get to the winner's circle - after so many years, maybe you stop thinking that you can. Because the grim reality of it all soaks in: the world is full of talented players. You need more.

Cut to last year's World Cup tournament. The team's performance in the game against the USWNT was heartbreaking. As much as I was rooting for the American women, I was rooting for a great performance from Brazil. Yes, they almost knocked the US out of the tournament. They were so close. But they played angry.

They didn't play with the kind of focused anger Wambach used to avenge herself against Colombia's Lady Andrade. Last year, Brazil played like they were angry at the world - like the USWNT had everything that they have been fighting for and have been denied. Like they were frustrated and like they were very tired of being frustrated. It looks to me like the battle with the CBF is breaking them. I guess they were just playing by the 'by any means necessary' playbook. Infamously, at about 115 minutes Erika plopped herself down on the field and just lay there, faking injury and eating up nearly four minutes of the game. After watching that, I wondered if I could ever want to see them win anything again, ever.

I still can't believe that happened.

In this tournament, Brazil has yet to be tested. Five unanswered goals against Cameroon isn't really a game. To score only one against New Zealand - late in the match, too - it doesn't bode well.

Whatever the outcome, Team GB and Brazil are both heading to the quarterfinals. They are playing to avoid moving on to face the second place finisher in group F: right now, that's likely to be the reigning World Cup champions. If it's not, then it's formidable Sweden Canada. The winner of this match, however, will move on to face Canada or North Korea. That's where both will want to be.


*I never trust this kind of information, as people have a tendency to frame every big women's event as a "first," even when history says otherwise. (The launch for the FA Women's Super League was staged at Wembley, but no matches have been played there.)

More thoughts on more losses (Mexico, England and the unfairness of it all)

It was all too much today - one great goal ignored (Lampard) and one totally, unambiguously offside goal allowed (Tevez). We watched some teams exploit their good fortune, and others collapse in the face of their bad luck.

It's become a World Cup scripted by Emile Zola. I am thinking of his utterly depressing novel L'Assommoir (the word means a dive-bar one goes to only to get hammered). At a key juncture in the story, the lovable drunk Copeau is doing his best to get his life together, but takes a bad fall at work and breaks his leg. His life is a fast downhill slide to abject poverty from there. He just doesn't have the constitution to overcome the kind of bad luck that in fact breaks a lot of people. My students always dig that novel, because this story feels real - the story of bad things happening to decent but very flawed people.

Is it in the service of realism, I wonder, that Sepp Blatter wards off all pressure to use technology to, say, confirm that, indeed, the ball has crossed the goal-line? Is that what he means by human drama - Life is not only unfair, it's a cruel and pointless venture?  

I don't think England had a win in them today - it didn't seem like it. Not when faced with Özil, Klose, and Podolski on the attack.  Germany played brilliantly - and, really, that's why they won.  But, like a character in a Zola novel, England can now stew in its bitterness, feel robbed, and pour more of its energy down the drain in a stream of complaint.

Mexico - oh, my heart.  The first twenty-six minutes of the match today were pure, insane delight. But then the magic fell apart with Tevez's offside goal. Players saw the disaster replayed on the stadium screens (as happened after Lampard's un-goal as well). That could not have helped matters - it was impossible to miss: Tevez was so offside that he must have known it himself.  The hand of God, moving one of his pawns into position. That sort of thing is dispiriting. So a few minutes later we see El Tri give up another goal with a limp pass - the sort of mistake made by someone who feels the decks are so stacked against them that the game isn't worth playing anymore. You feel screwed by the system, so you screw yourself.

Argentina played beautifully, Tevez made sure we knew he was more than a cheat, and fired one of the best shots of the tournament in the 52nd minute. Great teams exploit luck and the other side's error. They are captains of a lucky universe.  The rest of us pretty much just go down with the ship.

"It Isn't Easy Being Green"

So tweeted a friend, riding a global wave of empathy for the England keeper, who made an elementary blunder in today's match against the US and, well, cost England the win. At least in the headlines.

It is said that drama requires conflict. On the pitch, said drama falls largely on the defense's shoulders. Attack, defend, counterattack. Without that middle term, it's just attack and score. This narrative structure means that defenders appear to stand in the way - their job is to ruin someone else's game. And when one thinks like this, one only sees the defense playing a negative role. The positive work of defense is largely invisible to those without the patience or desire to understand the game's dynamics - without an appreciation of the art, without an appreciation of defense as the first moment of attack, one sees it at best as a kind of aggressive passivity.  As if defenders were just in the way.

Today was a great day for considering these things.  

Nigeria faced a frightening Argentina squad and held them to a single goal - that goal was won in first ten minutes, before Nigeria's defenders had settled their nerves.  Once they steeled themselves, we got to appreciate especially Vincent Enyeama's performance - stealing one goal after another from none other than God's apprentice, Messi. Enyeama seemed to enjoy the challenge - perhaps he was not happy to see Messi so frequently, but he was eager to show the world what he is capable of.

And a few hours later, the world was talking about Tim Howard - he pulled out one great save after another, and, like his Nigerian counterpart, Howard radiated energy and focus - screaming at his back line to pull themselves together after England stole their goal from yet another jittery defense in the opening minutes of play.

We are all thinking, poor Green - yes, he fumbled the ball and cost the match. But we should also lament that with the likes of Rooney, Gerrard, and Lampard on attack, England put only one ball in the net in the third minute, and then failed to score in the subsequent 90 minutes of play. This will be said, but that collective failure will not register as neatly as Green's one terrible mistake because it can't be captured in a single image, condemned as a single mistake. Howard's marvelous performance is as deserving a candidate for the "cause" of England's failure to win that match as is Green's mistake.  It gave the US room to attack - time and time again Howard collected the ball where others cannot, retaining possession to change the game's direction. But as marvelous as it is, and as much as we are all talking about Howard right now, it won't be remembered as long, or dissected nearly so intensely as Green's fumble.

And that's the keeper's curse in a nutshell.