Wow! The opening night of a brand new season

The currently-embattled Football Association’s new Women’s Super League season kicked off last night with the female version of a famous ‘city derby’ match between Everton Ladies and Liverpool Ladies played at Widnes. Reports of the match will testify that the match ended in a 0-2 ‘away’ victory for Liverpool even though Widnes is actually the Liverpool Ladies’ home ground.

The background to the new season is that in its previous incarnation the Women’s Super League was played during the summer months, the last full season having ended twelve months ago, since when there has been organised a ‘Spring Series’ to try and maintain momentum. Plus, of course, there has been the high-profile success of the England team (the Lionesses) under the coaching regime of the now-rightly-or-wrongly disgraced Mark Sampson whose dismissal by the FA has been dominating the media headlines in recent days.

And so the 2017/2018 WSL season was launched this month with a fanfare of favourable publicity provided by a British national media that is partly motivated by any supposed news story that will seemingly attract both sports fans and new readers/viewers and partly by its ongoing ‘moral’ need to be seen to supporting anything with apparent PC-correct brigade credentials.

New ‘enlightened’ initiatives in all sports – whether played by males or females – are often fraught with problems. This tends to come with the territory. For those involved in the promotion of women’s sport generally there is an underlying conceit that, if only the public would give it a ‘fair go’, within no more than half a decade the top women players would/should be justifiably entitled to be paid the same sort of humungous wages (i.e. well in excess of £50,000 or even £100,000 per week) enjoyed by the likes of Premier League stars such as Wayne Rooney, Harry Kane and Sergio Aguero.

That’s why the FA’s WSL has been revamped once again this season.

Previous the English women’s top flight team competition was a mix of genuine traditional ‘women only’ football clubs like the Doncaster Belles [now re-styled the Doncaster Rovers Belles] – which was devastated to be informed that it was being relegated from the WSL at the end of the 2013 season in order to make way for the women’s version of Manchester City – and what might be described as ‘women’s sections’ of elite Premier and other men’s clubs – not least the aforementioned Manchester City version – this being perceived by the powers-that-be as the best and/or only route to successfully establish a commercially viable elite women’s league.

To summarise, then.

The new Women’s Super League is a manufactured contrivance designed to present the elite women’s game in England as being as important (and potentially commercially-successful one day) as its male counterpart, helped of course by the insistent braying of the ‘equality lobby’ in all its forms and necessary fellow conspirators such as the national media – pathologically frightened of ever being seen as not fully behind every ‘right on’ hare-brained PC initiative that comes along – and indeed the first rank television sports channels.

The above goes some way to explain what I beheld by chance last night from about 7.15pm onwards when I began channel-hopping in the desperate hope of finding something worth watching that wasn’t the BBC1’s mind-numbing One Show and/or its schedule successor, the Sue Barker-hosted superannuated panel quiz show A Question Of Sport featuring those ‘lovable’ forty-something laddish team captains Matt Dawson and Phil ‘Tuffers’ Tufnell.

Yes, dear readers, I alighted upon live coverage of last night’s Everton Ladies versus Liverpool Ladies match.

That it made for a strangely fascinating but unsatisfying viewing experience was only to be expected. For those who did not witness it in the flesh or on television, I suggest you try to imagine a spectacle in which the presenting and punditry analysis did its level best to give the impression that what we were about to witness was going to be of as high quality and importance to the nation as any male version of this Scouser derby match.

Well, either that … or perhaps, alternatively, a high class, surreal, cod-parody comedy tour de force as might be made by Alan Partridge, or possibly Chris Morris, Marty Feldman or Spike Milligan.

Thus we were fed high-definition, close-up, pensive and ‘revealing’ changing-room interviews with a leading member of each of the team squads, in which the participants testified as to how hard ‘the girls’ had been training all summer in pre-season and just how much victory in the evening’s vital female version of the legendary Liverpool city derby rivalry would mean to them.

This was interspersed, firstly, with coverage of each team squad displaying their tiki-taka passing drills at opposite ends of the pitch against a background of  a sum total (I should estimate) of perhaps just 1,200 spectators sitting in the stand opposite the cameras … and literally nobody else anywhere in the cavernous Widnes ground.

In addition, whenever extracts of the previously-mentioned interviews and/or scenes of said passing drills were not being broadcast, we were either ‘entertained and enlightened’ by a trio of pundits standing pitch-side and/or a former player voicing-over general footage with high-energy important-sounding analysis and comment, full of soccer tactical jargon such a “flat back four” and “bustling midfielder”, leavened by reviews of individual players mentioning their outstanding dribbling skills and speed off the mark etc. and how this was a thrilling clash of the titans in prospect.

Er … or not.

It turned out – a fact mentioned almost only in passing during the coverage – that, after having spent the previous two or three seasons in the wilderness, the Everton Ladies team had only been catapulted into the new Women’s Super League by the artificial intervention of the FA following the sudden demise of Notts County earlier in the summer.

Meanwhile Liverpool Ladies had been WSL champions in 2013 and 2014 but had then been knocked off their perch by the aggressive development (and cash) of the Manchester City and Chelsea ladies teams.

They were the obvious favourites last night – as the result proved. Not that I saw the final knockings of the match, of course.

After watching the first ten minutes or so of the action – whose quality was, I should hazard a guess, no higher than that of an average teenage boys’ school first team, if that is not an insult to boys’ teams – I could take no more and returned to watching BBC1, on which the ‘quick-fire’ final round of A Question of Sport was taking place and providing marginally greater entertainment value.