By Tammi Dodger.
If you live in the way that you take it personally when the universe ruins your day, the upside is that it sometimes feels like the cosmos is giving you its blessing. That’s how it felt the first time the Lionnesses won the Euros in 2021.
I don’t really think the universe is personally invested in me. It’s like on exams results day. Some of your students get good grades, some of them not so good. If you take any credit for the good grades, you must also accept responsibility for the not so good grades. Me? I can’t help blaming myself for the bad grades and sometimes, doesn’t it feel like the universe is kicking you in the guts? So in those moments when everything goes my way, it’s nice to pretend the universe is giving me a little hug.
It was a memorable day when the England Women’s Team brought home the UEFA cup. But it was even more memorable for me because I was somewhere I never would have predicted.
More than 200 of us packed into a marquee to watch the match on a projector. Many of us were English, but there were people of several nationalities present, including some Germans, who were obviously supporting our opponents.
We had gathered for our own smaller scale tournament, with men’s; women’s, non-binary and trans, and mixed teams playing mostly football, but some netball, cricket and basketball as well. I was playing football.
I’d joined our club six months earlier, after being encouraged to do so several times during the previous years.
I’d always say: “Me, play football? Nah, you’ve got the wrong girl.”
But one drunken new year’s eve, one of them finally convinced me to give it a go.
The same year I joined, it happened that it was the turn of my club to organise an annual, international tournament.
I played seven-a-side football with the women, non-binary and trans players section of the club. In a neat display of coincidental symmetry, we made the final but the victors were a team from Germany.
That evening, one of our best players said to me in the bar: “You played really well today.” I thought I might cry.
In fact a lot of people said really nice things to me that tournament and I knew that I had been accepted, which was a big deal. And then that evening the Lionnesses won the Euros and it was the cherry on top of a wonderful weekend, the universe making up for some of its past misdemeanours.
Tears are common in these situations. A friend of mine welled up as they recounted the pain of being told aged 11: “Girls don’t play football.” This friend had always played football, little caring the gender of their teammates and opponents, then suddenly, the edict came down – this is not for you any more. I’ve heard the same basic story over and over again since. The friend and I arranged to have a healing game of two-a-side in the park and broke bread about feeling locked out of the great national obsession.
I could really relate to their pain. It was the great twist of my life that I ended up playing football. For decades I was much closer to being a football hater, which is a tiresome position in a nation of football lovers. But my story hadn’t started that way.
As a young child I couldn’t wait to start playing football. I read the Beano, and Dennis the Menace played football, so I wanted to as well. We didn’t play it at my infant school, but my parents told me that I’d get to play at my next one.
It was a masterful strategum to tell me that because I needed some convincing about my next school. Aged five my mum told me that I would be going away aged seven to live in a place called a boarding school. Five-year-old me didn’t like the sound of that one bit and it turns out my intuitions were bang on the money. As it would transpire, a three-decades-long contempt for football was the least of my injuries.
Oh privileged snot hated their expensive education, eh? Cry me a river!
It’s been said before. If it helps, I paid for all my own therapy, although I’m not commanding the sort of six-figure salaries synonymous with graduating from elite schools.
The point is that I didn’t want to leave home to live at school and if I’d had any inkling of how bad it would be, I might have dug my heels in harder. But in that moment the one thing that appealed to me was that I’d get to play football.
I didn’t have to wait long either. I played a match on my first full day at the school. One of the other children in my dormitory had been appointed to look after me. They showed me to the changing rooms, pointed me towards the pitch and left me to it.
I don’t remember how I felt, but I’m sure I would have been pretty nervous. There were 21 other boys, several at least a year older than me. Someone told me I was playing wing. I asked what that meant. They pointed me to where I’d need to be and we started playing an 11-a-side match.
The only other thing I remember was the one time I managed to get my foot in contact with the ball. Someone shouted: “DODGER! DON’T TACKLE YOUR OWN TEAM!”
Years later, I heard someone say that it’s a common mistake by novice footballers, they run towards the ball to get involved, rather than moving into space and calling for a pass.
The only guidance I’d had prior to this first match was an unusual game of one-a-side with my dad, who had no natural appetite for the game. His sport at school was rowing and the sport he followed was rugby, but he relayed the rudiments to me as best he could.
Unfortunately the rudiments didn’t touch the sides. I quickly became the kid who was hopeless at sport. Teachers would tell me off for not trying, shout at me to run around to keep warm. The more grown ups told me off for not trying harder to do the thing I was dismayed to learn I was useless at, the more deeply embedded became my loathing for sport.
And that was me for the rest of my education. The kid who hated sport.
But as I got older, football mutated into the very most grotesque kind of ex, the one who keeps turning up in the same places as you and flaunting their happier life. They casually humble brag about their superior career, then introduce you to their beautiful partner, while looking sarcastically sympathetic when you’re forced to respond to their inquiries by admitting that you’re single.
Every two years I’d have to accept that all my friends wanted to watch England play in an international tournament. I never really cared what happened, I just had to be the fish swimming upstream for those several weeks, having to conceal my delight when England would be knocked out. I wasn’t glad we’d lost, just delighted the whole ordeal was over for another two years.
Reunions with friends from uni got to be like watching an old-fashioned telly that keeps losing reception. They’d start talking about football and they may as well have been talking Arabic. Ten minutes would go by, twenty, thirty and I’d wonder how much longer I’d be locked out of the conversation like this.
As a trainee teacher I was prepped to get students on side by asking them about their teams. Follow the results, check in with them, especially when they might be feeling down because their team had a bad result.
Students wouldn’t wait to be asked though. The first thing they’d want to know was the team you supported. I’d say I didn’t have one.
“Oh, you support rugby is it?”
“No. I don’t follow any sports.”
Their faces would contort into a bewildered expression of some ineffable emotion somewhere between surprise and disgust.
By the time I hit my forties, without really trying, I’d forged a social life where I could avoid the whole thing altogether. I lived in cheerful indifference to all things football. Not hating it, just avoiding it wherever possible.
That was the situation when my club courted me to play for them.
This time I do remember how I felt the first time we played a match. Terrified. But it wasn’t the first thing we did during that training session. We started with some warm up exercises. Not physical fitness stuff. Our coach doesn’t make us run laps of the field or do endless press ups. He makes us practice passing. So we did that for half an hour and then started the game. I had no idea what to do, but I got through it and by the end of the session, I decided that I’d give it at least one more go. I mean, I had to buy the boots with moulds to be allowed on the pitch, so I had to get my money’s worth.
In one of those first few sessions, I called for someone to pass the ball to me. “Back if you need it!” I’d heard other players say it and it seemed like the thing to do.
“Great work calling for the ball!” someone said to me. Even now it astonishes me that I was praised for such a minor contribution to the game, but that’s what I love about our sessions. It’s all positive reinforcement. Meanwhile no one ever tells you off for not managing to do something.
That was four years ago now. This year I won the trophy for most improved player, although I did share the honour with two teammates. I’m still a bit indifferent about winning games or playing well. For me the important thing is to remember all my teammate’s names and to lavish them with praise as richly as I have been, especially new members, even though most of them are already better than me in their first session.
One night at training I watched an absolutely stellar goal unfold. One of our strikers jumped to catch a long ball on her chest, bumped it down to their foot then span their whole body around and scooped the ball into the back of the net.
Later in the pub I fan girled them about their spectacular goal. They thanked me and said: “You’ve really improved as well. You’ve been a great addition to the team.”
The thing is, what’s so validating about my club accepting me is that they’re a women’s team, while I was assigned male at birth. Which is to say, they’re a women, trans and non-binary team and they knew me socially and encouraged me to join.
I’m sure any bigots reading will already be itching to find a comment section in which to curse me to eternal damnation, but the point is, my squad decided they wanted to accept trans and non-binary players. They chose to include me and I couldn’t be more grateful.
Do I have a biological advantage? I think it’s undeniable in some ways, but it’s somewhat cancelled out by the lack of talent my personal history predicts.
We play in a casual league but this year, a lot of work has been made for the organisers. Even though we’re not professional or even semi-pro, the FA was our governing body. Meanwhile the FA outlawed trans and non-binary players at all levels so we’ve had to leave and sign up with a new governing body. I’m lucky I’m in a league that will do that, but lots of trans folk will lose their access to the sport.
Let’s remember the words of the late MP Jo Cox – “We are far more united and have far more in common than that which divides us.” If we as a nation can’t exist in the way that everyone gets to enjoy our national obsession, then what are we even doing?
And now the Lionnesses have won the Euros again. This time it wasn’t like the universe giving me a hug. I mean, it was never a hug from the universe, just a random set of events that couldn’t better have suited my mood even if it had been cosmically curated. The Lionnesses deserve all the glory and success, but I’m sure they’d be the first to celebrate the added benefit that more and more girls and women will get to play the sport that was off limits for their sisters in older generations.
In the quarter final I was sitting next to the same teammate who complimented my playing four years ago. I felt bad because I couldn’t match her energy as we watched. I asked her at one point: “Will you be devastated if we lose?”
“Of course!” she replied. “Won’t you?”
“Not in the same way. For me the winner is women’s sport.”
But we did win that match and the next ones too and each time we did, I was delighted that I’d get to watch another match, surrounded by my teammates, who changed my life when they showed me how to enjoy this football thing everyone keeps going on about.
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