Get Her Off the Pitch! by Lynne Truss Page A

to turn a tactful blind eye. In those far-off days, football news was rarely in the headlines, or on the front of newspapers, and mainstream television critics such as I were rarely exposed to the game as a subject on the main channels. Reviewing telly since 1991, I had probably seen three significant pieces about football: the first was a very funny drama by Andy Hamilton called Eleven Men Against Eleven (with Timothy West as a club chairman); then there was a documentary about Diego Maradona, focusing on the ‘hand of God’ incident, the significance of which seemed to me to have been absurdly over-exaggerated, given that football was only a game. The third was the now famous ‘Cutting Edge’ documentary on Channel 4 ( An Impossible Job ) charting Graham Taylor’s last year as England manager, with its hilarious touchline swearing, ghastly scenes of not-qualifying-for-the-1994-World-Cup, and the buffoonish and frustratedTaylor exclaiming, ‘Do I not like that!’ and ‘Can we not knock it?’
    What else? I remember my female boss - the literary editor of an academic weekly - once on a Monday morning in the early 1980s saying that she had watched some foot-ball at the weekend, and that she had generally approved of what she saw. ‘You’re kidding,’ I said. (Her usual leisure activities were playing tennis at a rather exclusive North London club and practising the clarinet.) ‘No, it was quite balletic,’ she said, her eyes wide in self-amazement. Apart from that, the footballing event that had impinged most on my consciousness was the Heysel disaster in 1985 - not because I understood how truly awful it was, but because I didn’t. At this time I had a crush on a chap in the office who made a perversely big show of adoring football, especially Italian football; and for some reason I always felt that he was putting this on. I thought he carried copies of La Gazzetta dello sport around just to annoy me (or possibly - which was worse - to arouse the interest of other men). Either way, I did not respect, understand or believe in his passion for football, and I remember a couple of days after Heysel asking him why he was still depressed.
    The Times ’s idea of sending an agnostic, literary, 41-year-old female survivor of colonic irrigation who’d always minded her own business to cover a bit of football in 1996 has to be set in context. And it’s quite simple, looking back. In the mid-1990s, football was mounting its bid for total domination of British culture - a domination that it subsequently achieved. Nick Hornby’s 1992 book Fever Pitch was responsible for making football respectably middle-class; Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Sports channels(launched in 1990) for flogging football as a seemingly limitless source of home entertainment. Everyone could see that football was breaking out in unlikely places in the 1990s. In the London Review of Books , for example, Karl Miller (the Northcliffe Professor of English at University College London; not the German footballer) wrote a hyperbolic essay on Paul Gascoigne’s World Cup performances in Italia 90, in which he described the flawed-heroic Gazza as, ‘Fierce and comic, formidable and vulnerable…tense and upright, a priapic monolith in the Mediterranean sun.’ At the other end of the mythologising scale, on Friday nights from 1994 to 1996, David Baddiel and Frank Skinner’s laddish and brilliantly bathetic series Fantasy Football League (BBC2) placed football in the same friendly bracket as alternative comedy. Football’s traditional associations - male, tribal, anti-intellectual, hairy-kneed, working-class, violent, humourless, misogynist, foulmouthed, unfashionable - were being undermined from all directions.
    Given all these signs and portents, it was naturally felt - by clever zeitgeist specialists such as Keith and David - that Euro 96 might be a tipping point. Match attendances,