"The only thing a woman sould be allowed to referee are my balls!" Thus spake the highly enlightened landlord of my local pub as he overheard our conversation regarding the football on the television. The match was the women's playoff for the 2011 World Cup, due to be held in Germany in June and July of next year and we were discussing why women weren't refereeing more football. It is widely accepted that the standard of a lot of sports differs hugely between men and women - particularly those sports of a more physical nature; fooball, rugby, tennis, athletics to name a few, simply because men are able to build muscle more easilly than their female counterparts. This means, for many sports, the question of inter-gender competition never crosses the minds of those in the boardroom, it would be too one-sided (thus dull for spectators) and potentially dangerous for athletes. However, why this should be a problem for an official is another matter entirely.
This question was recently prompted back into the front of my mind when I was looking into the developments being brought about in snooker. Recently the sport has undergone huge changes in an attempt to thrust is forwards into the 21st century with Barry Hearn's World Snooker, and no change is greater than the move to Power Snooker, a brand new format of the game where players play a half hour set for points rather than frames and introduces the inclusion to snooker of music, lighting effects and asprinkling of show-biz pizazz which it could be said has been lacking in the tactical battles of the best of 35 frame matches at The Crucible. In that respect snooker could be seen to be learning lessons from cricket, with is shorter Twenty20 format. However, in men's Twenty20 the women are to be seen scantilly clad waving pompoms whilst in snooker's version the women are incharge of everything - the games will all be refereed by women. For a few years now Michaela Tabb has been refereeing first class snooker, having refereed her first profesional snooker match in 2002 and her first professional final in 2007. In 2009 she became the first woman to referee the World Championship final at The Crucible in Sheffield, the highest acolade a snooker referee can earn, but power snooker takes that to the next level with all the officials being women. Just before you imagine me burning bras and cutting up men (SCUM manifesto - google it) there will still be cheerleaders, so it is hardly a feminist dream. But it is certainly a start.
Fooball too has begun to embrace female officials in the male game and some progress has been made. There are a couple of female officials in the English game - Wendy Toms and Amy Rayner, the latter of whom became the first woman to ref a professional game on 2nd Feb when as a linesman, her referee was hurt and she replaced him for the final 20 minutes of Coventry v Nottingham Forrest. But still they suffer wolf-whistles from the stands and even disregard from players and managers. In 2007 manager Mike Newell (no relation) was fined £6,500 for distinctly unsavoury remarks about Amy Rayner after a game she played linesman for his Luton Town side.
It cannot be skill as an official which is holding women back from top level officiating. In tennis for instance women officiate women and men men. It would be rediculous to claim that a woman could not officiate a man's game for whtever reason; so why don't they? Are a man's eyes sharper than women's? No. Are men able to concentrate for longer than women? No. Would a woman be put off by Rafa Nadal's arms or Roger Federer's arse? No, well maybe my housemate Laura, but she is not a professional referee, and I'd be lying if I said tennis was all tht was on m mind watching Ana Ivanovic. But surely a professional referee should be just that - professional, and thus they can deal with the game in whatever circumstances. It doesn't stop women in other work situations, why should it effect sports umpiring.
It seems then that all that is holding back women in official roles during sport is the boys club that is professional sport. This is surely dispicable and has to stop and gradually this bastian of male supremacy is being eroded to a more level playing field. It is not that I want to see men's sport flooded with women in official roles, certainly if they are not of the right standard for their level of sport; and I certainly do not want people put into a position to be a token, as Mike Newell (wrongly) claimed Amy Rayner was in 2007. But it shouldn't matter when professional sport takes place, whether the person in the middle is male or female.
David Newell 26/09/10
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