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SIDELINES TV WATCH THIS MONTH’S SCREEN REVIEW How do you know a man? By his words? By his deeds? By his reaction to the wrestling scene in Women In Love? With In Focus – Graham Potter (BBC iPlayer), Kelly Somers had eight minutes to humanise Graham Potter to the point where we, the public, can empathise with him satisfactorily the next time he is sacked. And we did catch a glimpse of the inner man. He has been skiing recently, for instance. A man of simple tastes, he used to like Oasis and went to see Taylor Swift twice last year. Short of holding a photograph of his parents up to his face and repeatedly shouting “It’s not your fault!”, there is little you can do in eight minutes in terms of peeling away the layers, so perhaps Somers made good progress. It felt as if we were watching something sincere and reflective because, between them, Potter and Somers used the word “journey” five times – once every 90 seconds – but really all we witnessed was a man admitting his job was difficult in a conversation of arranged informality. However, it appears Potter has a family, so West Ham fans, if you could perhaps rein it in a bit after a disappointing result. Also available on BBC iPlayer is a series called The Big Inter view, which, at 15 minutes in length, is aimed more at your The Histor y of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire audience. For the fourth round of the FA Cup, the BBC were at Leyton Orient for their tie with Manchester City (February 8). Alex Scott, Micah Richards and Glenn Murray stuck closely to the standard FA Cup script, encapsulated in one exchange in which Richards expressed the opinion, based on hours of research, that the Orient players “just have to go out there and enjoy themselves… it’s the magic of the cup!” Scott, with the same hypnotised knee-jerk reaction of her BBC newsroom colleagues saying “Israel would deny that”, responded immediately with “Anything could happen!” and they all laughed, because none of them has had this easy a job since they babysat a goldfish as teenagers. The only upset of the round came at Plymouth Argyle, where ITV had the luck of the draw. Mark Pougatch wore a younger man’s peaked cap in an image departure that was inexplicable until we saw his first acting performance in the Monzo advertisement shown during the break. Pougatch is a revelation playing a middle-aged man who has a positive outlook on new app-based challenger B R A D F O R D T I M banks. A few more parts like this and he’ll be presenting the final in a raw silk kimono from a wingback armchair. Directly after Argyle’s win, Bosnian centre-half Nikola Katic, who lost a tooth defending his goal, told Gabriel Clarke: “I fucking love it! I fucking love it! This is what I came here for!” Back in the studio, Pougatch was contractually obliged to apologise for the bad language. The most affecting thing a football player has said for years at the end of a football match – “This is what I came here for!” – was lost in the inappropriateness of the moment. But it is this seven-word yelp, not the approved cliches annually regurgitated by presenters and pundits, that Charles William Alcock would have strained to hear across the centuries when he mooted the idea of a challenge cup competition in 1871. There is a treasure trove of glory currently on YouTube, in the form of BBC archive films. A 1972 edition of Talkback, chaired by Michael Barratt, has Brian Cowgill, “Head of Sport”, answering criticism of televised football from an audience of 28 middleclass men in National Health spectacles and two appalled women. The older appalled woman said action replays were “stupid and unnecessary” because goals can be analysed later in the week “when Sportsnight with Coleman comes round”. Arthur Edwards was captioned “Query Clerk”. Mr Edwards, who will have developed his palpable sense of self-worth from somewhere other than his job title, felt that use of the close-up shot had “become excessive”, and consequently watching football had become “more like a mannequin parade.” NUMBERS GAME The figures behind the facts 1959 41 €10,800 The last time one of this season’s FA Cup quarter-finalists, other than Manchester City, won the competition The number of days between Aston Villa’s home game with Chelsea on February 22 and their next Premier League home match The fine for Luis Rubiales, found guilty of sexual assault for kissing Jenni Hermoso at the 2023 Women’s World Cup final ( 3 ) A L A M Y 6 WSC
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But Cowgill was operating in an era when people like him could get away with presenting television production as a recondite science intelligible only to experts and insiders and consequently was able to spend much of the programme calmly telling his interrogators they were mistaken. That has always been the great thing about British democracy, the lovely old-world courtesy with which those in control ignore the feedback. Cameron Carter I M A G E S G E T T Y , I A N I / T H E G U A R D A L E C S A N D R A R A L U C A D R Ă G O Donny lasses AFGHAN WOMEN On Thursday January 30, an Afghanistan women’s XI cricket team played their first ever match, facing a Cricket Without Borders side at the Junction Oval in Melbourne, Australia. The cricketers, contracted in November 2020 by the Afghanistan cricketing board to represent their country, escaped Afghanistan nine months later when the brutal Taliban regime regained power. Now settled in Australia, calls from the team and their supporters to the global governing body of cricket, the International Cricket Council (ICC), to officially recognise them as the national team in exile remain unheeded. Anyone aware of the fate of Afghanistan’s women footballers will note some similarities. August 2021 also saw the evacuation of the women's national football team and the development squad. The first team was similarly settled in Australia and also remains unrecognised as an official national side by their own sports governing body, FIFA. The development squad were eventually settled 10,000 miles apart from their first team counterparts, in Doncaster. The traumatic process is described in My Beautiful Sisters, the recently released autobiography of Kahlida Papal, the former captain and founder of the Afghanistan women’s national football team. The FIFA Women’s Football Strategy states that FIFA “will take concrete steps to Left Kahlida Papal, former captain and founder of the Afghanistan women’s football team; a post-match debrief for Melbourne Victory Afghan Women’s Team in 2022 empower girls and women, make football a sport for all and advocate against gender discrimination”. These words mean little when FIFA remains unresponsive while the government of one of their member associations practices violent gender apartheid, banning women from any sporting activity. Like the ICC, FIFA maintain that they are unable to unilaterally grant official recognition to national sides, that it is the responsibility of the respective member association. Without realistic prospects of officially representing their country in the immediate term, the exiled footballers find other opportunities to play together. In 2022 the Melbourne-based players formed the club side Melbourne Victory FC Afghan Women’s Team. Affiliated with Melbourne Victory, the club play in the sixth tier of Australian football. Their social media profile bears the slogan “Playing unofficially, representing passionately”. The development team, having arrived in the UK in November 2021, spent their first six months in Doncaster housed in a hotel. The then Leeds United owner and chairman Andrea Radrizzani, who part-funded the evacuation, provided them with kit, facilities and the opportunity to train at the club’s academy. Although conditions were far from ideal they, at least, were together and could con- tinue to play football together, says Papal. As they settled, the players began to forge their individual paths, studying and playing for local clubs. More recently, the players have regrouped to play together again under the name Girl Power UK, an arm of the not-for-profit enterprise set up by SCENES FROM FOOTBALL HISTORY No 396 D AV E RO B I N S O N WSC 7

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SIDELINES

TV WATCH THIS MONTH’S SCREEN REVIEW

How do you know a man? By his words? By his deeds? By his reaction to the wrestling scene in Women In Love? With In Focus – Graham Potter (BBC iPlayer), Kelly Somers had eight minutes to humanise Graham Potter to the point where we, the public, can empathise with him satisfactorily the next time he is sacked.

And we did catch a glimpse of the inner man. He has been skiing recently, for instance. A man of simple tastes, he used to like Oasis and went to see Taylor Swift twice last year. Short of holding a photograph of his parents up to his face and repeatedly shouting “It’s not your fault!”, there is little you can do in eight minutes in terms of peeling away the layers, so perhaps Somers made good progress.

It felt as if we were watching something sincere and reflective because, between them, Potter and Somers used the word “journey” five times – once every 90 seconds – but really all we witnessed was a man admitting his job was difficult in a conversation of arranged informality. However, it appears Potter has a family, so West Ham fans, if you could perhaps rein it in a bit after a disappointing result. Also available on BBC iPlayer is a series called The Big Inter view, which, at 15 minutes in length, is aimed more at your The Histor y of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire audience.

For the fourth round of the FA Cup, the BBC were at Leyton Orient for their tie with Manchester City (February 8).

Alex Scott, Micah Richards and Glenn Murray stuck closely to the standard FA Cup script, encapsulated in one exchange in which Richards expressed the opinion, based on hours of research, that the Orient players “just have to go out there and enjoy themselves… it’s the magic of the cup!” Scott, with the same hypnotised knee-jerk reaction of her BBC newsroom colleagues saying “Israel would deny that”, responded immediately with “Anything could happen!” and they all laughed, because none of them has had this easy a job since they babysat a goldfish as teenagers.

The only upset of the round came at Plymouth Argyle, where ITV had the luck of the draw. Mark Pougatch wore a younger man’s peaked cap in an image departure that was inexplicable until we saw his first acting performance in the Monzo advertisement shown during the break. Pougatch is a revelation playing a middle-aged man who has a positive outlook on new app-based challenger

B R A D F O R D

T I M

banks. A few more parts like this and he’ll be presenting the final in a raw silk kimono from a wingback armchair.

Directly after Argyle’s win, Bosnian centre-half Nikola Katic, who lost a tooth defending his goal, told Gabriel Clarke: “I fucking love it! I fucking love it! This is what I came here for!” Back in the studio, Pougatch was contractually obliged to apologise for the bad language. The most affecting thing a football player has said for years at the end of a football match –

“This is what I came here for!” – was lost in the inappropriateness of the moment. But it is this seven-word yelp, not the approved cliches annually regurgitated by presenters and pundits, that Charles William Alcock would have strained to hear across the centuries when he mooted the idea of a challenge cup competition in 1871.

There is a treasure trove of glory currently on YouTube, in the form of BBC archive films. A 1972 edition of Talkback, chaired by Michael Barratt, has Brian Cowgill, “Head of Sport”, answering criticism of televised football from an audience of 28 middleclass men in National Health spectacles and two appalled women.

The older appalled woman said action replays were “stupid and unnecessary” because goals can be analysed later in the week “when Sportsnight with Coleman comes round”. Arthur Edwards was captioned “Query Clerk”. Mr Edwards, who will have developed his palpable sense of self-worth from somewhere other than his job title, felt that use of the close-up shot had “become excessive”, and consequently watching football had become “more like a mannequin parade.”

NUMBERS GAME The figures behind the facts

1959

41 €10,800

The last time one of this season’s FA Cup quarter-finalists, other than Manchester

City, won the competition

The number of days between Aston Villa’s home game with Chelsea on February 22 and their next Premier League home match

The fine for Luis Rubiales, found guilty of sexual assault for kissing Jenni Hermoso at the 2023 Women’s World Cup final

( 3 )

A L A M Y

6 WSC

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