Football: A Game of Two Half-Wits
The sexist remarks made by Sky Sports presenters Andy Gray and Richard Keys off-camera during Saturday’s Wolverhampton Wanderers vs Liverpool FC match were appalling but hardly surprising. Soccer is notorious for its sexist attitudes towards women. Take Notts County banning Karren Brady from their boardroom and Luton Town manager Mike Newell giving referee Amy Rayner so much abuse that he made global headlines. Of course it’s brutish behaviour, but it makes me wonder if soccer is the last bastion of male chauvinism?
The belief that football is a man’s sport is all too prevalent both on and off the pitch. Which is precisely why we need women like Sian Massey – the official at the centre of the Keys/ Gray controversy – to effect change and bring much-needed balance to the sport. Bigots may try to push women like Sian out with their derision, but that’s all the more reason why more female officials are needed in football. Equality is always worth fighting for – especially in the face of such vile opposition.
Paradoxically, it was football that taught me to stand firm in my own convictions. A lifelong Liverpool FC fan, I have supported my team all the way from their golden era of the eighties through to the painful lows when they lost almost every accolade they had. Dark, devastating times.
And our opponents’ fans loved them.
There was nothing I could do to make Liverpool play better. But I wasn’t entirely powerless. Thanks to the fantasy football league in my workplace, I could exert some control over the weekly fixtures and use the knowledge I had built up over so many years. Yet, the better I played, the stronger the opposition I faced. This culminated when I won the league; the runner-up refused to pay his fees when he found out that the only female out of twenty new recruits had beaten him. It was a bittersweet victory. But a victory nonetheless.
Changing the status quo won’t ever be a smooth transition. Nor will it ever make you popular. But when it needs changing – as it does so badly in football now – all you can do is keep charging ahead.
Keep up the good work, Sian – you’re playing a blinder.
Regina de Búrca hails from the West of Ireland. She has been a Liverpool FC fan since the age of four. She writes books for teenagers and has a MA in writing for Young People from Bath Spa University. She currently lives in Dublin. Twitter: @Regina_dB
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“…it makes me wonder if soccer is the last bastion of male chauvinism”
Erg, not likely.
What makes me laugh about the latest sexist flurry from The Lads is how it smacks of blustering desperation. It’s doubtful that Mr. Gray and Mr. Keys would ever have said their petty little comments to Sian Massey’s face. Likewise, however threatened they feel by a woman’s holding a position of authority on the field, that’s where she is and there’s not a lot they can do about it, apart from titter behind her back. Tragic, really.
The other thing that makes me laugh is how sexist buffoons like this think the offside rule is something mathematically complicated and mysterious, as opposed to a blindingly obvious solution and a very sensible measure. Guys, if your girlfriend doesn’t understand the offside rule, it’s because she’s either (a) not bloody interested, or (b) as thick as a plank, not because she’s female.
or (c) she’s lost track because FIFA change the interpretation of offside position/interfering with play/active/phases of play etc every flipping season.
I have no problem with the suggestion that “most women don’t understand the offside rule” as long as the person making it concedes that that most blokes don’t either. That specific woman? Almost certainly understands it in more detail than those specific blokes ever have or ever will.
What about the argument that shows like “Loose Women” should be taken off the air, they spout the same stuff in a more cutesy and clichéd manner while knowingly on the air.
My point: don’t let what two people say to each other in what they thought was private boil into a ridiculous Us v Them argument.
I’ve always bristled at the men-are-useless-oafs school of female comedy/chat, to be honest. You see it a lot in advertisements, too; the notion that a man is a helpless fool who needs to be guided and pitied by a female partner.
Having said that, this was a focused comment on a professional’s ability to do her job based on her gender. But yes, it was said in private, which is why I think of it as rather sad, instead of rather sinister.
I don’t think it is private, certainly the SKY recording staff and sound engineers can all hear it.
Hi guys.
I’ve written about the Keys/Gray affair over at Joe.ie.
Irish men don’t much like Gray and Keys, and I sincerely hope this is the end of them.
Article is at http://www.joe.ie/football/football-opinion/richard-keys-andy-gray-sian-massey-sexism-009012-1
(Feel free to delete, and apologies, if this is considered spamming…)
Cool, next time I want to know what all Irish men think, I’ll just ask you.
Private, as in, not meant for their adoring public to hear. If this is what passes for banter over at Sky Sports then that’s even more tragic.
Aye, Gray’s comment on her looks was even worse. As Granny used to say, he’s no oil painting himself.
Sky once sacked a pundit for making a stupid tsunami-based joke. It was thoughtless and tasteless, but it didn’t indicate a deep-seated prejudice against any group in society. gray and Keys should realise that a huge part of the reason why they’re able to get paid shitloads for talking in clichés about the game they love is because millions of women love and watch the game too.
Also, the offside rule is not remotely complicated, but it doesn’t stop a huge amount of barstool pundits from pretending they understand it.
What makes Keys’ comments in particular even more crass is his own position compared to Sian Massey’s.
You don’t just walk in off the street and run the line at a Premiership match. Sian Massey will have started in parks football – thankless freezing weekends at municipal sports grounds, probably changing blocks with no women’s facilities, maybe even having to change in the car.
From there she’ll have worked her way up through county and semi-professional football, passing exams and passing them well, keeping at it until she reached the highest possible standard that qualifies her to run the line at Anfield. Very few make it this far. She didn’t turn up at Anfield that day and ask if she could have a go with the flag, she was there entirely on professional merit. She knows the mechanics and nuances of the game better than just about all of us reading this.
Richard Keys is utterly unqualified to comment professionally on football matches and frequently proves it. He is, at best, a facilitator not a pundit. He worked his way up from the comfort of the TV-AM sofa to the Sky studio. His view of the game is always from a gantry or a glass-fronted box. He has passed no exams; he has no football qualifications, he has never played the game even semi-professionally. If Gray has any defence at all – and on this particular topic he doesn’t – at least he played the game at the highest level albeit a long time ago.
I’ve not had a Sky subscription since Charlton fell out of the Premier League, but I can remember being aghast at Keys’ and other occupants of the Sky studio’s frequent shocking ignorance of the laws of the game. The laws are constantly changing and being tinkered with, something that often catches out the Sky (and indeed BBC and others) analysts.
Occasionally they’re even ignorant of some of the basic set-in-stone laws that have been there for decades: when I had Sky I lost count, for example, of how many times Keys and Gray demonstrated their apparent unawareness when re-running borderline decisions of the fact that there are three different flag signals for offside depending upon the part of the pitch in which the offending player is encroaching beyond the last defender. Their job is to interpret the decisions of match officials yet as I remember it it seemed they didn’t even know some of the basic signals used by those officials to communicate their decisions.
The ridiculous notion that Sian Massey’s knowledge of a basic and integral law of the game is deficient because of her gender is bad enough, but coming from people who have demonstrated how their own grasp of the laws is sometimes tenuous when they are being paid very well to interpret them shows up the farcical lads’ club nature of English punditry. How many pundits have actually read and digested the laws of the game from cover to cover, I wonder?
Two things give me hope for the future in this matter: the first, that Rio Ferdinand and Graham Poll have spoken out against Keys and Gray: I never thought I’d be on the same side as them about matters of football.
Second, Kenny Dalglish. Keys commented that Dalglish would go potty if Massey was involved in a controversial decision, the implication being that this pottiness would be exacerbated by there being a woman involved. Yesterday before his regular press conference Dalglish knowingly asked the Sky reporter present if he was OK with there being women journalists in the room. His own daughter is an experienced sports journalist, yet Keys assumed – wrongly – that Dalglish would share his views.
If people like Ferdinand, Poll and Dalglish are on the same side over this, there’s hope for Sian Massey and the women that will follow her yet.
And anyway, given that Keys’ and Gray’s media careers have been based on the weekly criticism of the deficiency of referees, all of whom are male, you’d have thought they’d be all in favour of women officials.
An Arsenal blog, Arseblog, had a great take on this story:
http://arseblog.com/2011/01/a-gray-day-for-keys-chamberlain-centre-halves-and-rvp
The second half of the post is all about Arsenal and the current transfer market but the first half is about the Keys/Gray story. The first half is very June Caldwell-esque and I can think of no higher compliment than that.
Andy Gray’s just been fired, more news developing.
More evidence of Gray’s behaviour.
Eww, what a pig. No doubt he considered that flirting!
Delighted. Maybe Sky can use this is an opportunity to revitalise their football coverage, and stop treating the viewers like know-nothing fools.
Their coverage of sports such as rugby and cricket are intelligent, informative and entertaining – is there any possibility they could replicate that in soccer?
Possibly not. The majority of former players who graduate to punditry don’t exactly inspire confidence.
[...] is an expanded version of a comment I left on the Anti-Room blog earlier [...]
just a note , I believe media coverage of this has been somewhat risible.
I am curious as to why broadcasters are so dismissive
of the issue and do not even trouble to get commentators
from actual sport’s women ?
Also Andy Gray was fired for a combination of things. He got a warning yesterday for his comments regarding Massey, but then the sack today when it came out that he’d made some inappropriate comments to Charlotte Jackson (a fellow Sky Sports presenter) back in December. That video is on YouTube as well.