Forget Glastonbury, this band rocks!
SATURDAY night on the BBC was all about Glastonbury but, come midnight, the live action was taking place on a field a lot further away than Somerset. England Women’s World Cup team made sure of that. Whether you went in caring about it or not, this team has made a strong case for us to sit up into the small hours and pay attention. There will be those of you who were doing so from day one. Or perhaps you had your interest peaked as the team started pulling off wins. And there will be those still yelling ‘bah, humbug’ at your tellies. Whatever your position, the quarter-final win over Canada did the licence fee proud and brought in a decent audience for that time of night, 1.6 million. Until Saturday, the BBC coverage had felt rather low key, a little earnest. Everyone was trying to make sure the tournament was taken seriously. Which you can do, but without being all serious about it. But against the Canadians, host Jacqui Oatley and her panel of ex-England pros Rachel Yankey, Rachel Brown-Finnis and Trevor Sinclair were up for the cup, even if their sterile, cramped studio didn’t give them much elbow room in which to do it. On commentary, Jonathan Pearce was really bubbling, and sounding like he was caught up in it all. And thankfully for the viewers, he spent many of the early minutes punctuating his analysis with back stories that painted a vivid picture of who we were watching out there, and why. Mind you, all that went out of the window 15 minutes in, when he exclaimed: ‘Why didn’t Canada learn? To be honest, I don’t care,’ as England went 2-0 up. At half-time, the studio had picked up on the ebullient tone established by Pearce. As Oatley said, it ‘wouldn’t be England’ if they hadn’t let Canada get back into it with a goal. That late strike by the hosts helped inject some extra fizz into the chat. Perfectly exemplified by the fact Brown-Finnis admitting she’d ‘missed most of it’, because ‘I was going mental.’ Mind you, by the end of the game, she had plenty of company as the Lionesses hung on and celebrated wildly. As Oatley announced joyously from back in her broom cupboard: ‘England women. Making history’. While goalscorer Jodie Taylor then tearfully said during her interview that she ‘hoped we’d done the nation proud’. So next comes Japan in the semi-finals on Wednesday on the stroke of midnight. What will be interesting to see is if the people who followed them into the wee small hours of Sunday will do so again in midweek? After all, this is an England team making the aforementioned history.