Published: 9 August, 2012
by CATHERINE ETOE

WOMEN can play football.

Who knew?

Well we all do now a home Olympics has put the elite of the women’s game on show for all to see.

Two weeks ago it was a case of blink and you’d miss women’s football.

Now it’s been on the newspaper front, back and middle pages and tickets to the Olympic final between the USA and Japan at Wembley tonight (Thursday) are selling like hot cakes.

They say that around 83,000 people will attend that match.

That’s 83,000. Not two men and a scabby dog, but 83,000.

I thought the world had turned on its head when 70,000 went to Wembley to watch GB women play Brazil.

But 83,000?

If it‘s true, then around 660,000 people will have paid to watch women’s football during the Olympic Games.

Paid. Money. Not bad for a sport that the ignorant among us used to associate the words ‘eaten‘, ‘too many pies’ and ‘can’t play’ with (and they‘re the ones fit to print).

Now the associations are much more flattering and about time too.

I have been covering women’s football since 1999 when the editor of this newspaper packed me off to write about Arsenal Ladies.

In the years since I have written about World Cups, European championships and countless domestic tournaments in these pages.

We always knew women’s football would have its day, one day.

That day, to my mind, came when GB beat Brazil and the gentlemen of the press stopped trudging around like husbands sent to visit their mothers-in-law and started smiling like kids who had found a secret Christmas present under their beds.

Why? I would say it’s because they’d seen good football and interviewed footballers who spoke with emotion, fluency and honesty.

They were not the over-media trained millionaires they were used to.

They were real people.

They had real stories to tell.

And they really could play.

So, as the tournament comes to a close, it’s safe to say that women’s football has finally grabbed the media’s attention and the public‘s imagination.

The trick now is keeping it.