It starts with the newspapers, and the Indian ones are a pretty good indicator of this exclusionary approach. Since the World Cup now has a sizeable fan base in India, the mainline dailies feature front-page tear-sheets in addition to full pages in the sports section devoted to tournament coverage. But for the standard match stats, these sections could well be mistaken for pages from a lads' magazine or page 3 from the Sun tabloid.
For instance: star footballers' profiles are invariably accompanied by information about their wives and girlfriends (collectively known as WAGs). The purpose of providing this data is easy to understand when you realise that it gives sports page editors, who are almost invariably men, licence to publish lascivious photographs. Most of these WAGs, so uniformly stunning as to become confusingly similar, appear to be models of some description. For some reason, a fair proportion of them are lingerie models. This provides layout artistes a handy opportunity to reproduce artfully placed cut-outs of these WAGs scantily clad and posed in provocative ways.
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Don't get me wrong, there is no moral issue here; men (and I suspect scads of them are middle aged) are entitled to their kicks. My objection is that presentation of this nature is clearly targeted at just one section of football fans, and it emphatically excludes women. Personally, and in some indefinable way, I find it alienating, just as I do when men employ crude abuse or tell off-colour jokes in mixed company.
TV coverage is no different. Apart from the odd kid or quirkily dressed man, the roving stadium cameras almost exclusively hone in on good-looking women in the crowd, presumably for the delectation of men viewers. As irritating is the tenor of the studio coverage. Perhaps encouraged by the male producer, the male anchor somehow feels obligated to comment on the women on which the camera is focusing.
From the knockout stages, Sony Six chose to inflict Joe Morrison on viewers. Initially, even I was happy to see him since he is a huge improvement on the inept amateurism of the previous local anchors. In the regular football season, the amiably goofy Mr Morrison, beloved of young football fans, anchors the UEFA Champions League match analysis for Ten Sports together with two former footballers with thick, unintelligible accents. The tone of the coverage is distressingly lowbrow and laddish ("Ding dong," one of them actually once intoned while viewing a close-up of an eye-catching young lady in the stadium). The quality of World Cup analysis is of a similar tenor: peppered with silly questions and proforma feeble jokes about the women in the crowd ("I'll try to concentrate, Robbie," Mr Morrison smirked when the camera focused on a random stunner in the crowd).
Let me hasten to clarify: women football fans are by no means grim, humourless spectators. Depending on, ahem, their ages, they deeply appreciate Andrea Pirlo's rakish good looks or James Rodriguez's fresh-faced charms as much as these footballers' wizardry on the field. Nor are we pining for close-ups of handsome or half-dressed men on the sports pages by way of a compensating inclusive strategy. My point is that this is an entertaining but not very relevant sidelight to the game and could well be excluded from formal sports coverage.
By way of counterpoint, consider the insightful professionalism of the BBC or The New York Times' coverage or the TV crews of John Dykes, Andy Townsend, Steve McManaman, Gerry Armstrong and company who appear week in and week out during the regular football season for the various European leagues. They manage to be entertaining without ever relying on sexist tropes.
Remarkably, however, even STAR/ESPN fell prey to temptation during the 2010 World Cup. Instead of the usual anchors, the local service chose one Mayanti Langer, a former US college footballer, to anchor the pre-half- and post-match programmes. Ms Langer's Miss Universe looks and form-fitting cutaway gowns may have provided the male audience an agreeable distraction, but after a while, even the appreciative studio guests were hard put to mask their irritation at her average understanding.
Guys, football is the sexiest sport on the planet. It doesn't need sexing up to enhance its appeal. Ask women, we really know.