Fida – Time To Get It Right

Anxiety creeps in thinking about Australia/New Zealand hosting the Women’s World Cup.

Why? Because I’m a mixture of scared, nervous and furious with anticipation that our leading media organisations won’t have women covering the build up and the occasion.

Heck, I’d even take football people, who know and love the game as an absolute bare minimum.

If you flick through leading websites on who writes the rare article on women’s sport, the byline is usually a mans.

This one today The Guardian Australia couldn’t even get FIFA correct. Tracey Holmes is a well regarded sports journalist, I’d bet all my chocolates she wouldn’t have called it “Fida”. This is of course all the more ironic and painful considering the article is about fighting discrimination. Soccer is a sport often tagged with being for “sheilas, wogs and pooftas” in the words of Socceroo legend Johnny Warren, surely correct terminology is a low standard in the context of respect in sport.

If Australia and New Zealand win the rights to host the Women’s World Cup, media organisations need to lift their game to see more women involved in its coverage. Many of us have been slogging in the industry for years and would bring a world of knowledge that would be a fecking asset to any organisation covering soccer in a nation tipped to host the World Cup.