Why I, for one, am glad Andy Gray spoke out against women in football

Right, bear with me. The attacking options with respect to ex-Sky Sports Presenter Andy Gray are more numerous than those confronting Wayne Rooney in a one-on-one situation.

Yes, Gray’s comments were misjudged; yes, his comments were demeaning to women; yes, his comments were boorishly puerile even by the standards of pre-schoolers. But it is not all bad: just look at how men have rallied to the cause following his comments. It is enough to make me proud of my biology.

I think Gray’s words have had a wonderfully galvanising effect on male football fans the length and breadth of the country. The maelstrom that has cost Gray and his co-presenter, Richard Keys, the dumb and dumber of sports broadcasting, their jobs has shown their pre-historic views have no place in modern football. With old, sexist attitudes previously bubbling away on a low simmer, this was the prod the game needed to make its menfolk sit up and say: you know what? It isn’t the 1950s anymore.

Sue Mott described this week in the Daily Express how twenty years ago she asked Ron Atkinson, then managing Sheffield Wednesday, for his views on women in football. This is not the kind of question Big Ron is well-equipped to answer; his reply: “a women’s place is in the kitchen, bedroom and the disco”.

Fast forward twenty years to the comments Gray and Keys made which started the train of events that led to their dismissals from their cushy £1 million-a-year jobs. Following an extremely well judged offside call in a Liverpool match, Gray said this of the lineswomen in question, Sian Massey:

“Can you believe that? A female lineman! Women don’t know the offside rule.”

Keys, rolling over and having his tummy tickled, added “Course they don’t. The game’s gone mad.”

Now that the pair have some extra time (boom, boom) on their hands, I think I’ll invite them down to watch my Sunday league team. If they think Sian Massey’s adroitly judged line call was “mad”, I would love to see what they make of the regularly egregious decisions made by our (male) referees.

Only last weekend, I played the line beautiful only to be wrongly (a view I shared alone at the time) flagged offside. I felt I had been cruelly wronged. The truth is Sian Massey, a highly trained and qualified lineswomen, made a wonderfully skilled offside call which the vast majority of the people in the stadium at the time got wrong. For Keys and Gray to denounce that as “mad” is, well, mad.

Other female sports broadcasters have reported similarly depressing tales this week. National institution, Gabby Logan, described in the Times how she was instructed to “have a baby” when she told her bosses that the shows she was being given were not stretching her.

Perhaps the lowlight was an embarrassing scene that once confronted Jacqueline Magnay. On interviewing the president of a rugby league club after a match she explained how:

“one played jumped up on a table stark naked and swung his hips to the cheers of his teammates”.

This, admittedly, was in Australia and not chilly England but one can only hope, for the player’s sake, that this incident did not happen during the winter season.

Women in sports broadcasting, as in all other forms of work, should be judged by the quality of their output and the skills they bring to the table. Sian Massey did brilliantly. She should not be subjected to such sexist nonsense; she should be fast tracked to officiate at more important games. I would love for her to call Manchester United players off-side when they next play my team, Arsenal.

The furore that has greeted Gray’s comments has shown casually ignorant sexism now ‘aint kosher in football as has long been case in other sports for years. No-one tells Paula Radcliffe or Jessica Ennis to stick to doing the dishes as they rack up medals for Team GB around the world.

It also shows how much more mature the relationship between the sexes is in Britain that in Italy, where cartoon misogynist Silvio Barely-stops-getting-ani seems to have managed to regain his oily grip on power after his centre-right friends backed him up. He’s probably offered to throw them a party to celebrate.

But back home, for Gray and Keys it’s not so much “bunga, bunga” as “bunga off”. Quite right too and I’ve managed to write this without once using the ‘Gray shown the red card’ cliché. Oh, damn.

Daniel Bamford is the Young Fabian Networks Officer.