Enough about you, let's talk about David Beckham

I don't understand why everyone in British sports has to measure their performance and successes by what David Beckham thinks.  I doubt that David Beckham understands it either, he may even be faintly embarrassed by it.  During the 2012 Olympics, the BBC had to delay interviewing a British medal winner so the person could be congratulated by Beckham.  A more modest man may not put himself first at a time like this.  This level of fawning is not healthy for anyone, particularly me as every time I witness it, my blood pressure goes up.

For the first time in nearly 50 years, England now has a national football team that can not only perform well at international level on the pitch, but aren't hampered by scandal, ego and a conflicting life as a fashion model off the pitch.  Yes, England women's national football team have reached the semi-finals of the 2015 world cup.  Imagine how it must feel for them?  If you had the opportunity to put a question to them, what would be in your top five?

The ladies have not had anywhere near the support their male counterparts regularly garner just for putting on designer suits.  Should one of our strikers in the men's national team get the ball into an actual goal, the nation celebrates.  I include myself in this apathy towards the women's team.  I have watched some of this world cup, but not much.  I shall however watch tonight's semi-final against Japan - my bandwagon has been ordered.

Even though I haven't watched every game, I still expect professional sports journalists to afford the women's team the respect due to their performance.  Yesterday evening I drove home from the beach listening to Radio 2's 'Drivetime' - because I am at that age when I leave a beach as the teenagers with their skinny bodies, dreadful music and blue alcohol arrive.  At the end of the show, a
reporter interviewed Jodie Taylor of the women's team about the team's progress in this world cup.

Taylor, like many of her team mates, plays in the USA, not here.  Male players only move to the USA when the lucrative offers stop coming in from Europe and the US team wants a higher profile and a few shirt sales.  Jodie Taylor went out to there early in her career with a scholarship for Oregon State University.  Why do we not have our own scholarships here for both men and women?  I wonder how much more a player like Harry Kane would have benefitted from a system like this rather than wandering around the second and third tier.  We don't develop our young players very well, regardless of gender.

The women's team have therefore done incredibly well given the lack of home funding and support, not to mention beating the host nation in the quarter finals.  Their progress, the games to date and the up-coming semi-final all provide rich pickings for any journalist interviewing them.  The BBC's Seth Bennet preferred to focus on other aspects of the game.  His third question to Jodie was 'how does it feel when you are getting tweets from the likes of David Beckham?'.   The women's team have reached the semi-final for the first time in their history.  The men's team haven't reached the semi-final since Italia 90.  Despite this, Bennett seemed to think a tweet from Beckham was more noteworthy than the games and goals in themselves.

Bennett ploughed on with his line of questioning 'is this beyond expectation for  you?'.  Bennett would have done well to read the Guardian's Bandwagon Guide prior to his interview (link here).  The team have come on in leaps and bounds since the current manager, Mark Sampson, took over 18 months ago.   He then asked Taylor if she considered that Great Britain having a team in the Olympics was crucial to the England women's team winning international championships.  So that's why our national men's team are so poor, we don't get to play in the Olympics.  It has little to do with being overpaid, few youth academies and too much of the Premiership profits going on wage bills for superannuated overseas players.

Taylor very diplomatically noted towards the end of the interview that the focus was to 'keep doing well in this world cup first and foremost', just in case Bennett had forgotten what the interview was about.  I hope that there was a lot more to the interview than that and Bennett's questions were more insightful but just very poorly edited, because after their achievement so far in this contest, if those were all the questions he could muster, women have a long way to go in sports before we can be treated on anywhere near the same level as men.