Get Her Off the Pitch! by Lynne Truss

Wonderland who sit in their jury box, writing emphatically on their little slates, both ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’, because both words are equally valid.

Football and the Thrill of Knowing a Little Bit
    Towards the end of May 1996, the sports editor of The Times asked me out to lunch, which was a bit weird. Sport was another country, as far as I was concerned. At the time, I was 41 years old, had been a columnist and TV critic on the paper for five years, and had once written a piece for it concerned specifically with women’s apathetic attitude to sport, in which I’d confessed that I routinely tipped the second section of The Times (the bit with business at the front and sport at the back) into the bin each morning as it was quite clear that the basic qualification for a reader of this section was possession of a pair of testicles.
    It had never occurred to me, by the way, that by expressing this viewpoint I might hurt anybody’s feelings. It seemed like a harmless statement of fact. And, in mitigation, I did go on to explain that I was always obliged to retrieve the second section of the paper from the bin later on - with a squeal of annoyance and a pair of tongs - when I suddenly remembered that the arts pages were in there, too. Anyway, when I met sports editor David Chappell and his deputy Keith Blackmore, and they startedoff by helpfully reminding me of the column I’d written (Keith said one of his sub-editors was so outraged by it that he had cut it out of the paper and pinned it on a noticeboard), I didn’t know what to say. I wondered briefly whether they had been appointed by their colleagues to take me out to a public place and there strike me about the face and neck with rolled-up copies of Section Two.
    Whether what subsequently happened to me was an enormous and Machiavellian Grand Revenge on Miss Hoity Toity is a question that I still ask myself. Because, as things turned out, these chaps were to control my life for the next four years and change me for ever. At the time, however, our meeting merely seemed a bit odd, as we obviously had so little to talk about, professionally speaking. For example, they asked me what I knew about the forthcoming ‘Euro 96’, and I said, cheerfully, absolutely nothing, never heard of it, but probably something in the sporting line was my present guess. They seemed pleased by my unfeigned ignorance (and helpful attitude), but they nevertheless found it hard to believe. Had I really not noticed that England was about to host football’s European Championships? That’s honestly news to me, I said; and (no offence intended) not very interesting news at that.
    I then politely asked whether this Euro thing took place every year - and it was at that point that Keith rubbed his hands together and ordered another bottle. What did I know about Terry Venables, then? ‘Some sort of crook?’ I ventured. Ever heard of Alan Shearer? Nope. Although, in an effort not to sound clueless, I think I mentioned a coach company called Shearings - which might not be strictly relevant (especially as it was, um, a different name).How would I feel about going to some matches and writing about the championships from this blissfully innocent point of view, Keith said. And I said, well, I suppose I could. Journalists do all sorts of peculiar and unnatural things in the line of duty don’t they? Personally, I had once undergone colonic irrigation for Woman’s Journal . Football could hardly be worse than that.
    I’m always glad that we had that conversation, those nice sports editors and I, because it fixes a moment for me perfectly: a moment when football was just a kind of noise that came from the television in other people’s houses. I knew that some of my friends were married to men whose passion for football was indulged domestically (or so I believed), but it was something that took place behind closed doors; it was easy