Watching Northern Ireland’s women’s football manager Kenny Shiels giving his absurd rationale that the reason his side were battered 5-0 at home by England, was down to women being “more emotional than men” was utterly bemusing and grossly offensive.
His comments are not only unfounded, but are also extremely damaging for women’s sport, because an international manager has fed the archaic gender stereotyping narrative that women are too emotional for the cut and thrust of competitive sport.
With reference to women’s football teams conceding goals in quick succession, he said - “In the whole spectrum of the women’s game, because women and girls are more emotional than men, so they take a goal going in, they don’t take that very well”.
He continued “When we went 1-0 down, we killed the game, tried to just slow it right down to give them time to get the emotional imbalance out of their head”. What a load of codswallop!
First and foremost, the emotional state of women isn’t just confined to the football, so if there was any remote truth to this accession then these alleged emotional frailties would show up across all sports.
Yet to my knowledge it has never been reported that there are more 6-0 sets in women’s tennis, or more batting collapses in women’s cricket or wider scoring margins in women’s golf etc.
It certainly isn’t the case in hockey that women concede more goals in quick succession. What is more concerning is Sheils attempted to demonstrate that his comments are backed up by the fact, as he told reporters to “check the records”.
Whilst he may be correct that there are more goals in quick succession in women’s football matches, he has negated the fact that this is because women’s games, particularly at international level, are much higher scoring than in the men’s game– so quite obviously goals will be scored closer together.
HAVE YOUR SAY! Should Shiels be sacked for what he said? Let us know in the comments section
A basic mathematical concept he seems to have failed to grasp.
Rather than this being down to women having an emotional imbalance, it is much more likely due to the much wider spectrum of rapid investment across women’s football compared to the men’s game.
The difference in relative quality between a lower-ranked women’s and a lower ranked men’s side is enormous - which leads to these massive gulfs in ability and score lines. The naivety of a women’s international manager to not understand this and excuse his personal failings is frankly alarming.
How does Sheils justify his side only having 24 per cent possession at home or the fact they only managed one shot all game? Was that also down to his women being more emotional? Why weren’t Southampton ’s men accused of being too emotional when they conceded four goals in 23 minutes against Chelsea?
Sheils ended his press conference by saying “I shouldn’t have told you that”, which tells me that that despite his subsequent apology, he doesn’t regret his bigoted opinions, he regrets saying them out loud.
If I was one of his players, I wouldn’t want to play for him again.
