Funnyman football pundit Tam Cowan kicked up a hornet’s nest last week after slagging off the Scottish Women’s Team and their incredible 7-0 victory over Bosnia.
In a newspaper column Cowan suggested the sacred turf of his beloved Motherwell FC should be “torched to cleanse the stadium after it played host to women’s football”.
He mocked the women’s game as a “turgid spectacle”, suggested players were masculine hulks and concluded: “Face it, folks, nobody cares. There was barely a thousand inside the ground, shocking for an international in any sport. Incredibly, the game was live on telly and radio! Surely even the most fervent fans must agree it’s time to chuck it?”
Sadly for Tam, BBC Scotland chucked him instead. Cowan was red-carded and Off The Ball took to the airwaves without him for two weeks running. So now Tam’s sorry. Sort of.
“Hands up it was a spectacular OG and I want to apologise to anyone who was offended. I’ve often said I wouldn’t open the curtains if a women’s football match was being played in my back garden. From now on, the curtains will probably still remain shut. But so, I promise, will my mouth.”
Aye, but will that stop the snoring? More importantly is that enough of an apology to get Tam off the hook?
His main beef seems to be that no one watches women play football. With zero publicity, support and “supporters” like him and Andy Gray at the heart of sports journalism, that’s no surprise.
But so what if women’s football is played but not watched? That’s what sport used to be all about. Doing, not watching. Enjoying, not posing. Winning, not whining.
“Expert” armchair spectators seem to knock everyone who simply enjoys taking part in sport and hero-worship the overpaid “superleague” of under-performing men. Does that tackle our appalling record on health or equality?
A recent survey shows 90% of men only pretend to like sport to appear more acceptable to friends. A sizeable 61% fake an interest in football, 52% are bored rigid by Formula 1 and 34% play golf just to stick in with the boss!
Sneering and laughing at folk whose faces don’t fit has long been acceptable in Scotland. It’s one reason so many women leave Scotland altogether.
Former BBC presenter Kenneth Roy made an important point about the Scottish macho culture Tam represents when he said: “I shared a platform with a retired footballer who, over dinner in mixed company, seemed pleasant enough. But as soon as he stood up, he was unable to finish a sentence without the F-word. He wasn’t blue, just very, very coarse. I wondered at the time if, in some strange way, this was the language of survival in male working-class Scotland.”
He’s right. Scratch the surface of polite Scotland and there’s a hard, bitter, unforgiving machismo we’ve long tolerated as a reality check on bigheads. It’s crippling Scottish society. Tam was described as a newspaper version of Life On Mars’s chauvinist detective Gene Hunt.
But let’s be fair. Tam’s no throwback to the ’70s he’s a throwback to the Stone Age. And that’s long gone.
But the boy’s not daft. He’ll think about this stooshie and find an outlook fit for a country set to host a dazzling array of athletes, religions, races and both sexes with respect and humour at the Commonwealth Games in less than a year.
When that New Tam finally emerges, I’ll be listening.
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