This is a repost from “An Absolute Cracker”, a short-lived Tumblr of mine.
I was excited to see that Fox’s own Jamie Trecker personally attended and then wrote about the women’s Champions League final today. Until I read it, that is. What an insulting, condescending turd.
Take the same piece and imagine it being written by some baseball or NFL journalist, attending the men’s final, then patronizingly patting everyone on the head for a nice little time with your little ball, but concluding with a sniff that their sport was still The Bestest. You’d have soccer fans everywhere up in arms. But somehow the so-called “senior editor” at Fox Soccer gets away with gems like the following:
While you might turn up your nose at the idea of seeing a women’s club match (as some of my fellow ink-stained wretches did when I mentioned it to them this morning)
No need to be apologetic about going to a world-class soccer game, bro. I’m sure they’ll still let you back into the clubhouse when you get back.
Before you ask, yes, it was a “real” soccer crowd
Again with the defensiveness. Not sure what else 50,000 fans would be. I guess he expected all soccer moms and little kids, plus players’ families?
Now, let me be frank and say that the game would not have made you forget Manchester City.
Well that’s no shocker, since that Man City match was widely regarded as one of the most exciting games in modern Premier League history. And remember, nobody seems to think Saturday’s Champions League final will make me forget Man City, either, even though those players have boy parts instead of girl parts.
the only people who didn’t look like they enjoyed the atmosphere were the players – they looked very nervous in front of the wall of people . . . partly because the women usually play to pitiful, invisible crowds.
This was a bigger than usual crowd for them, okay, fair point. You don’t have to be quite that vicious about it, though. I mean, really: “pitiful” and “invisible”?
And even though the level of play isn’t that of the Premiership, Lyon wasn’t half bad. Still, the future of the sport is not feminine.
Whuh . . . WHAT? What. What the fuck is _that_? Ohhhhhh. Ah, yes. That’s a reference to ol’ Sepp’s comment (“We have always believed that the future of football is feminine“).
And there we have it: Trecker’s whole point in going, his whole point in writing about it. To refute year-old empty rhetoric from a corrupt old dickbag that nobody likes or even believes about anything, anyway.
Dear Jamie. The sport doesn’t have to be masculine or feminine. It can be both. There’s enough room for both! There are apparently 50,000 people who are into women’s soccer enough to attend that match just two days before the vaunted men’s final is held in that very same city. That fact will probably not hurt attendance on Saturday. It’s okay. Men’s soccer is not in danger, and you don’t need to defend it. And if you’re uncomfortable with or incapable of covering women’s games as, you know, actual games, then please don’t bother. Your contribution will not be missed.
The moral of the story: forget Trecker and Fox’s “coverage” of the women’s game, and just read Jenna Pel at Pro Soccer Talk. Instead of one token paragraph, you get a whole story about the actual game, with no gender agenda either way.
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