I’ll make an embarrassing admission before I start: I hadn’t watched any of the Lionesses’ matches until Sunday’s final. So, it was a shock to my flatmates when I found myself sobbing over the collective achievement of a group of women I’d only (shamefully) until this week been familiar with from news articles and friends’ Instagrams.
I could pretend my great surge of emotion was down to the gravity of football history being made and 56 years of hurt (yes, it was the women who finally brought it home), but the truth is it was something far simpler. There in front of me, for the first time I can certainly remember, was a group of women being lauded purely for their achievements, not their looks — and, more importantly, celebrating entirely un-self-consciously about it.
Chloe Kelly clearly didn’t intend to tease or titillate when she joyfully twirled her shirt over her head after scoring the winning goal. Leah Williamson and Millie Bright weren’t thinking about grass stains or camera angles as they slid across the pitch and made confetti angels on the ground. And Kelly certainly wasn’t thinking about sponsorship deals or sticking to a script when the microphone was thrust in her face by a poor BBC Sport reporter in need of a news line from the winning goal scorer.
“I just want to celebrate now,” she told the cameras, peeling off to chant Sweet Caroline with her teammates after speaking from the heart. There was a pure, unfiltered joy about the women’s celebrations and like most people across the country, I literally could not take my eyes off them.
“Don’t ever, ever give these Lionesses any media training and hide their personalities,” fans wrote on Twitter. “No PR-speak, just pure joy!” wrote others. Many contrasted the women’s and the men’s teams. “The men’s team is drab, dull,” one tweeted, praising the women’s infectious enthusiasm and personality. The crowds felt different, too. Refreshingly, it wasn’t the post-match cliché of men behaving badly, but women, men, girls and boys behaving... well, naturally. And it was beautiful.
In this case, that sense of unfiltered joy clearly came from the top. That this team of un-self-conscious women was led by a woman who seemingly couldn’t care less about smiling for the camera or what she was wearing was plainly no coincidence. Sarina Wiegman had an infectious confidence about her and it reminded me of something a male friend once said that has blown my mind ever since: that he had honestly never stopped to wonder what other people thought of him.
His confidence left my (female) friends and me dumbfounded at the time — and this week it got me thinking. How many women do you normally see on TV who seem to really, truly, act like no one is watching? Certainly not on Love Island, which followed on ITV shortly afterwards and felt like the antithesis of the Lionesses: self-centred, filtered, scripted. And certainly not in most women’s sport I’ve watched growing up. Even modern sporting heroes like Serena Williams and Emma Raducanu seem more media-trained when they speak — and who can blame them? They don’t have the protection of a team around them to be silly and celebrate with.
Shows like Love Island might make me depressed about the future but thankfully Sunday night’s game has given me a flicker of faith. Young girls have an entirely new set of role models to look up to and there’s no shortage of candidates for this year’s BBC Sports Personality of the Year. The whole team should win.
In other news...
Speaking of role models, did Beyoncé just score the most spectacular own goal of the showbiz season? Last night, the Hollywood megastar announced that she’ll be re-recording a section in her new album, Renaissance, after receiving backlash from listeners over use of an offensive term — the same slur disability groups slammed fellow singer Lizzo for using just two short months ago.
Surely Beyoncé and her PR machine can’t have missed it? Ablelist language is unacceptable, and repeating it just comes across as careless and short-sighted.
Words matter. As an artist who’s made a career standing up for women’s, trans’ and black rights and been called a role model for equality, she of anyone should know that.
