Just 48 hours after the Matildas sold out a 12th consecutive home match with 54,000 fans heading to Marvel Stadium to watch the national team qualify for the Paris Olympics, Australian women’s football will this week achieve another huge milestone off the pitch.
An all-female commentary team will make history when they take to the microphones to call an entire round of the A-League Women.
It is the first time that only women’s voices will be heard over a full weekend of professional football broadcast in this country. To my knowledge, it is also the first time women will both call the play-by-play action and deliver expert analysis for an entire round of any professional league, in any code, in Australia.
I’m honoured and delighted to be a part of this history-making commentary team, but also not surprised it has taken until 2024 for women to be afforded priority in the booth. As a female sports journalist and play-by-play caller, I’ve navigated a labyrinth of glass ceilings throughout my career.
“Too high-pitched” is among the nicer fragments of feedback I’ve received. “Fuck female commentators off, shits [sic] so unprofessional” popped up on my timeline two weeks ago. Unfortunately, such messaging on social media is all too common.
Pundits love to call out every stumble a woman caller makes. Public critiques come with the territory, and I lie awake at night agonising over those mistakes. But I can’t help noticing that when men slip up (as any commentator invariably does), it’s apparently less offensive.
Women often appear as sideline commentators, in a change that has slowly become normal in recent years, even on men’s football matches. Women are also now providing expert commentary and Grace Gill did a fabulous job of it during the Women’s World Cup last year. But in the most crucial Matildas games, like this week, it is always a man calling the play.
Australia lags behind the rest of the world in this space. British viewers have grown attuned to women’s voices since Jacqui Oatley took the reins of a Premier League match back in 2007. Female callers have featured on the Women’s Super League broadcasts in England for years. No one’s ear drums burst when those dual high frequencies hit the airwaves.
In Australia, AFL and AFLW have made breakthroughs – Kelli Underwood being the first trailblazing female commentator on a men’s AFL match in 2009 (when she copped plenty of white-hot male fury for it). Cath Cox and Sue Gaudion are familiar Super Netball play-by-play callers, and in my opinion are two of the most entertaining and knowledgeable in any sport. But no broadcast – until now – has dared leave women to their own devices in the commentary booth for an entire round.
Once women make it into the booth, we face an uphill battle to succeed. Sports are entertainment products, and the best broadcasts rely on expensive production elements – multiple cameras, on-site commentary, graphics, replay editors, multiple directors, and plenty of marketing. This is why a lack of investment in women’s sports can be so challenging.
You might not be able to articulate the problem, but when watching a football match with fewer camera angles, no matter the gender of the players, the play will appear slower and less exciting. As a mentor once told me, “Audiences won’t be able to tell you the molecular structure of shit, but they can smell it.”
Smaller budgets in women’s sport broadcasts of any code means fewer producers, directors and sideline reporters to help us do our job and feed bits of information back to commentators. If we accidentally miss an interchange while calling remotely because a camera was not positioned correctly, the blame falls on the caller.
Sports commentary is an interesting pursuit. There isn’t really a standard career path into it, and there are very few offical training courses. Global Advance Production Services, the production partner on the A-Leagues, identified this gap and pioneered training for my fellow female commentators now calling A-League Women games. A Victorian organisation called Making the Call is offering training for women commentators – but that is funded by the state government and only available to Victorians.
As for me, I stumbled into it as a sports journalist whose school report card once read “could talk underwater with a mouth full of marbles”.
I started in local Sydney hockey leagues and progressed to national tournaments, absorbing every lesson and piece of advice from more experienced callers along the way. I didn’t just get here on my own. Men in leadership positions have put their reputation on the line to offer me chances. They have had to actively push for change, open doors and pull me through.
Two years ago, Dan Hemingway, a producer on A-League Women matches, made it his sole ambition to create an all-female commentary team for the women’s game. This weekend we will achieve his goal. That’s just the beginning.
A-Leagues commissioner Nick Garcia told The Global Game podcast this week that women’s memberships have grown 700% on last season, attendance numbers are up 123%, and viewing hours are up 140%. Clearly, the league’s trailblazing commitment to growing women’s involvement on and off the pitch is paying dividends.
Now, Hemingway tells me he wants to work towards a new “first” – an all-female production crew. When I point out that would put him out of a job, he shrugs.
“That’s the dream. It would be worth it.”
Kate Allman is a freelance sports commentator and journalist
