Kerr’s heroes inspire kids in enlightened times

SCOTLAND’S most successful national football team hosting the current World Cup holders definitely feels like another giant leap forward for the women’s game. The fact that it’s also guaranteed to annoy the hell out of the permanently enraged misogynist rump, those keyboard-clattering he-men who decry the very existence of Shelley Kerr’s (right) over-achieving squad? Well, that’s just a bonus. A beautiful, beautiful bonus. News that Scotland are to host the USA — three-time World Cup winners and fourtime Olympic gold medallists — in Paisley next month reinforces the impression of a national select moving in exalted circles. In these circumstances, even the dwindling band of old-timers defiantly ‘holding the line’ against progress must know they’re fighting a losing battle. Why? Basic demographics. Specifically, the arrival of a new generation for whom there is no great schism between the men’s and women’s international game. To boys growing up playing alongside girls at clubs and in school teams, right up to Under-13 level in some areas, there is just fitba’. These kids are not merely tolerant of the Scotland women’s team. They are actually fans, readily citing fine professionals like Kim Little and Erin Cuthbert as obvious favourites. No, even the nation’s best female footballers are not as popular — yet — as Andy Robertson. But when Little, Cuthbert, Lisa Evans, Jen Beattie et al are gracing next summer’s World Cup finals in France, live and in prime time on terrestrial TV, you had better believe that every football-daft wee lad in the country will be tuning in. For those of us who grew up in a less enlightened time, an age when the very notion of a ‘lassie’ playing this man’s game only conjured up thoughts of Dee Hepburn dancing her way through Gregory’s Girl, this can be more confusing than trying to spell Caracas correctly without recourse to an atlas. Anyone who went through the strike-ridden school sports programme of 1980s Scotland will know that, back then, boys played football and girls played hockey. No crossover, no mixing. That would be unnatural. It takes time to overcome that kind of ingrained prejudice. Nor is the cause helped by a domestic women’s game incapable of capturing the public imagination. But Kerr’s squad, stocked with players from Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester City and United, is testament to a production line churning out key Scottish influencers of the English game. It’s all a bit retro, actually. Like it was when the men’s team — packed with ‘Anglos’ driving their clubs to glory — used to qualify for World Cups as a matter of course. Oh and, incidentally, why do so many frame this debate as a battle of the sexes? Where is it written that, by supporting the men’s or women’s team, you have to wish ill upon the other? The kids don’t think that way. Maybe they could teach us old fellows a thing or two.