Saturday, August 07, 2010

Things Have Changed

It's the start of the football season, league only, but it's started at home. It's always such an exciting time, with Dr. TOH absolutely blindingly optimistic, me far more pessimistic, but it's an open book. Anything might happen - although I usually know that nothing good really will end up happening to Spurs - the Champions League qualification really was a shock - but Carlisle, Wednesday, something good really might happen.

But listening to 606 today, I was really quite heartened by something. I don't normally listen, but after the cricket was over early for bad light, I wasn't quite ready to stop the sports fest. And I noticed a couple of things: 1) it is completely normal for women to do the sports round up, which certainly wasn't true 10 years ago; and 2) the host and the guest, a footballer, as well as a caller, were quite happy to discuss the beauty of David Ginola (it is remarkable, obviously) and how he would "bowl over" a person in his presence. It's just... so different. The normalcy with which these straight men discussed Ginola's gorgeousness and his charisma, and it's not being outre, it's not being controversial, it's just normal. For all the moaning about the changing nature of football, this was a discussion that I think they couldn't have had so normally even ten years ago. Same with Danny Baker's admission of his swooning at the beauty of Dimitar Berbatov, which spawned a massive, weekslong discussion on his show of the other men that male fans had a thing for. It's great. Really, truly, great. I may be doing them a disservice, and it's really not based on any sort of evidence (other than it not happening in any of the matches I've watched so far with them), but I honestly can't imagine a lot of male American sports fans that I know discussing NFL players similarly. Which is a shame, because there's a lot of nice things to look at in that sport.

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