Moving the Goalposts

By losing a match at the highest level in a heartbreaking fashion, England's women have truly ascended to the same status as the men's team. Not that this is what they were trying to do; I'm just trying to conjure a comparison in the language of those men who, five pints deep on Sunday morning, reckoned that they could give it a go in central midfield.

As a friend of mine pointed out to me, the women's game should appeal even more to this type of person. The type of person who decries the state of modern football, and harks back to the glory days of two-footed legbreakers. There are of course many valid criticisms to be flung at the men's game, and you wouldn't get away with a cheeky elbow in the women's game these days either, but its certainly a lot more like football was in the 80s.

Sam Kerr, Chelsea's star striker, is the highest paid player in the women's game, earning £417k/year, less than half of what Erling Haaland earns in a week. Obviously that's still a decent whack, but its still less than what John Barnes (the highest played Premier League player in 1992) earned 30 years ago, even before you adjust for inflation.

If you were to ask English football fans when the heyday of Proper Football was, I'd guess the average would land somewhere between 1975 and 1984. That's when it was a sport played by real men, who played for the badge, not for money, and when you could leather someone as hard as you like so long as the referee didn't see it (and sometimes it was still okay if he did).

While Kerr, and others in the highest tier, are paid big bucks, the average is a lot lower, with wages in the Women's Super League around the £30k mark on average. Certainly not generational wealth. I have no doubt that the wages will go up (possibly even to the point where people fume about how the money could be going to soldiers and nurses), but for now its as close to the Real Thing as you can get. Hopefully at least some of the trolls are able to see this, and maybe the Lionesses will have some unlikely fans by the time the World Cup comes around again.

Of course by then the women's game may well have been bought by a tech giant or an oil baron and everyone will be making silly money, but for now we have Mary Earps, winner of the Golden Glove at the World Cup, whose shirt you cannot buy from the Manchester United shop. Just like the good old days before squad numbers, eh.

Anyway - King's Cam took on UCL last night. The stakes weren't quite as high as the world cup final, but as a reader commented last week, I'm going to do my best to make it seem as though they are.

Izzatdust kicked things off with the Tokugawa period of Japanese history, and they took a hat-trick of bonuses on the author Herman Hesse, whose novel The Glass Bead Game has been sitting on my TBR pile for about two years. Izzatdust doubts his answer of TGBG, forgetting that the word 'the' does indeed count towards the total number of words in the title.

After Mulholland negs with Ram and Hall fails to steal with Vishnu, Izzatdust takes the third starter with Fourth Estate. We couldn't be on for a third nine-starter performance in as many weeks could we? Perhaps that's a bit premature, but Hall continues UCL's great start with consciousness, and the Londoners found themselves 65 points clear going into the first picture round.

Making up for his earlier mistake, Mulholland takes this with Sumatra, and they raced to a hat-trick on the names of islands. Phillips Dibb takes anothe quickfire starter and King's close to within 25, but Finlay steals back momentum with triple axel and UCL are on their way again.

Zachariah gets her first starter, before Finaly negs with Aziz Ansari. The question had asked for a single given name, so Mulholland tries his lucky with Aziz, thinking perhaps that Rajan was laying down the law with a harsh disallow, but he's wrong too. Its Rami.

After waiting a while, and then buzzing tentatively with a guess, Zachariah takes the music starter with Mozart. We're more than halfway through now and Izzatdust hasn't taken another starter, so my prediction isn't looking too hot. It's also not really fair, because even if I was right, it would look like I'd written it after the fact, making this a lose-lose situation. Still, will I remove that section? No.

As if to drive my wrongness home, Phillips Dibb then steals a question on the Portuguese flag right from under Izzatdust's nose - he having introduced himself as being Portuguese and Azerbaijani. Actually, hang on. After Sawh and Zachariah get one more each, Izzatdust does claim another. If he gets every single one of the rest we could be back in business here.

A baffling guess of Exmoor from Zachariah, on a question about the city of Maldonado in Uruguay, followed by another neg from the same player - mistaking Joy Division for Genesis - probably ended the game as a contest. Had they claimed one of those then King's may have had a chance, but when Sawh takes the next starter we're done. The Cambridge side grab a few more points to close out the match, but unfortunately its not going to be enough to make the high-scoring loser play-offs.

King's 145 - 190 UCL

Another good game, that, and I might be warming to Rajan too. Still too early to plant my flag, and I think he needs to get rid of the screen, but maybe he does have something about him after all. No nine-starter performances this week, despite Izzatdust's pair to open the game, but all eight players scored either two or three, which is pretty cool in itself.

See you next week for East Anglia vs Strathclyde. In the meantime, please subscribe by clicking the link over there...