Women's football and the beers

It's dumb that historic violence at the men's matches means Southampton FC Women can't have nice things

Last week, @yjw_x (Yasmin) asked fans on Twitter what could be improved about catering at St. Mary’s. Among my boring gripes about plastic teacups that melt your hands, there is only one thing that sticks out in my mind as genuinely unnecessary and wrong-headed. The question was timely because I was going to see the women’s team that night. St. Marys had just entertained West Ham, so going to Snows Stadium in Totton for first time, I was looking forward to a pint.

Birmingham City was a symbolic meeting for Southampton FC Women. Last May, on a stellar FA Cup run, they dashed weaker teams aside until meeting Birmingham in the fifth round. It was billed as a chance for the upwardly mobile third-tier promotion hopefuls to test themselves against a WSL team, one that one day soon, they hoped to play regularly. A 3-2 defeat meant we could write it up as a narrow, spirited loss; but the truth was we got bullied hard for 80 minutes by a much more professional outfit — in quality, and also literally. They got paid to batter us, full-time. It was 3-0 until the 84th minute but a couple of late consolations saved our blushes.

Monday's 1-0 win was a chance to see how far the newly promoted and now full-time-professional Saints had closed the gap. Birmingham had narrowed it themselves by getting relegated to the second tier, and early tension was perhaps a reflection of two teams trying to sniff out each other’s new level. The game opened up, slowly but surely. Saints grew and City wilted, but ultimately either side could have snatched a tight game before Lucia Kendall, off the bench on her return, slotted a neat finish into the far post in the 83rd minute.

1-0 was the right scoreline, scored by the right player. Kendall is one of a dwindling number of veterans from the cup game last May as the team’s meteoric rise continues to drive player turnover. It was a hard-earned, cathartic win, narrow but fair, an ode to the gentle, steady progress borne of graft that Marianne Spacey-Cale has cultivated. As a Saints fan, it had parallels to the 1-0 win at Anfield when Ralph cried at full-time: on the surface just a close midweek league victory against one of the division’s better sides; but beneath, a fraught, draw-out vindication of a project similarly long in the making. Kendall did a knee slide under a huge LED screen brought specially for the fixture. Having sold out the ground on a cold Monday night in Totton, in front of over 1,000 supporters, it blinked 1-0.

Anyway so about pints. On entering the ground, I asked the first steward I saw if I could take drinks to the pitchside. This is one of the things I love about certain levels of football, but the rules vary. The steward, a serenely calm man in his early 20s, replied, “Like what?”. I’d assumed my question was simple, but I clarified, “As in alcohol.”. Mulling it, he fixed his eyes on the stands, as if the answer to my question might be gleaned from the terraces themselves. They were not forthcoming. “I don’t think so”, he said conclusively, but clearly by his own deduction rather than memory. I thought about asking another steward, but the game was about to kick off, and in truth his deduction was probably right.

Not to read too much into it, but this felt like a telling response. That he didn’t even know, suggests that he had neither anticipated that somebody might want to drink alcohol at a women’s football match, nor that it presented a possible fan behaviour issue that the stewards had to manage. Not absurd, just… foreign. A foreignness to the idea of coming here to booze. His mind whirred. Alcohol? At an association football match? No longer petrol to flames, but it just isn’t done. It can’t be allowed. But then, a women's match… a different competition, different context, different culture - what are the rules?! Like a schoolboy trying to fathom the norms of female social interaction, his mind boggled. Perhaps the terraces did give him their verdict after all. As he looked up into those concrete shelves with steel standing rails lined with restless men, structures not seen in the men’s pro leagues since Hillsborough, “no”, he conjectured, football is still football, and at English football you cannot drink in the sight of the pitch. And this is a professional team now, after all.

This is not technically true. The legislation that prohibits the sale and consumption of alcohol at certain times and places at football matches applies to specific named leagues, specifically the top six tiers of the men's game. I accept that the alcohol regulation is pretty patchwork across the grassroots. At my hometown club, Romsey Town, Wessex League rules (not UK law) prevent me from taking my drink to the edge of the pitch, or beyond the wooden pagoda (yeah we have a pagoda), outside the clubhouse. This means I can drink in sight of the pitch about ten metres back from the corner flag, over the heads of the fans at the railing, with no elevation. So close and yet so far. Romsey Town are in the 9th tier and get gates averaging a little over 100. At my local club, Dulwich Hamlet, a window running the entire length of the clubhouse bar overlooks the pitch from the top of the main stand, kind of like the hospitality boxes at St. Mary’s, but for punters. On the opposite side of the pitch, a gazebo, some kegs, foldaway tables and a chip and pin machine form a second, pop-up bar. No food, just a pure pint pouring operation. Dulwich are in the 6th tier and average gates are somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000. On hot summer Saturdays pint queues will stretch the whole length of the byline behind the goal. Mad to think to that promotion to the Conference National might mean the end of all that.

So when over 5,000 fans turned up at St. Mary's earlier this year to watch the women’s team beat Portsmouth and win the Women’s National League South, I was surprised to find you couldn’t take beer out of the concourse. I would have expected this to feel normal, given it has been the case for every other visit to St. Mary's I’ve made (excluding a work Christmas do where I got hammered in the Mick Channon Suite having won best pirate costume). But surrounded as I was by families, children and mixture of genders and ages, it all felt a bit unnecessary. When it’s heaving with geezers it all made a lot more sense.

And this is the heart of it. It makes little sense to me that the women’s team, which is growing and the club is trying to grow, should have matchday experience and attendance constrained by a fan behaviour issue that is exclusively endemic to the men’s game. More than that, the different atmosphere is perhaps the unique selling point of women’s football. That, and what easy, cheap, honest fun it is. There is surely an opportunity here to demonstrate the possibility of an alternative culture of football fandom, one that isn’t locked in tension between two toxic and nontoxic poles of masculinity. When I told my sister that I was sad not to have watched the final of the women’s Euros in England because I would have liked a bit of pint-throwing, she replied that actually that’s what she enjoyed so much about watching it at a pub in Peckham — no pint-throwing, just good vibes. Neither of my sisters have been to a football match before. They are both coming to Arsenal on Sunday.