This summer is a great one for women’s sport. We will see England, the reigning Commonwealth champions, going for gold at the Netball World Cup 2019 next week, and the Women’s Ashes are in full swing. But nothing has captured the nation’s imagination quite like the women’s football World Cup.

I’m one of those people who, when asked if I watch football, replies: “Only when the World Cup is on” - but I never thought that response would also encompass the women’s game. Given how generously the title “role model” is handed out to footballers, it has been refreshing to watch players living up to it for once. Simply by existing, the Women’s World Cup teams provide a direct challenge to stifling ideas of what a woman can do – and what a healthy woman looks like. And while there are still no openly gay male footballers active in the upper echelons of the sport, there are many openly lesbian players, coaches and trainers who are outspoken about LGBT and women’s rights in the female game.

This, however, is just one of the things about women’s football that appears to rub some up the wrong way. When the US player Megan Rapinoe said in an interview that “I’m not going to the fucking White House” if her team won the tournament, Trump reacted with characteristic charm, tweeting, “Megan should WIN first before she TALKS! Finish the job!”. She went on to score two more goals in the quarter-final victory over France.

Piers Morgan isn’t a fan, either. Rapinoe’s open-armed celebration after a goal apparently offended him, prompting that she “sure does love herself” (what footballer doesn’t?) and that he hoped England would “dent her stupendous ego” in the semi-final. Yet the team have made a habit of proving gobby, insecure men wrong – and they won 2-1. Anyway, the problem, it appears, was less about the celebration and more who it came from – because days later, Morgan tweeted praise for the batsman Jonny Bairstow’s century by sharing an image of the cricketer pulling an almost identical pose to Rapinoe’s.

With their very existence so obviously riling up certain types, part-time fans like myself end up seeing disgruntled sexists, rather than the other team, as our opponents. And given the cesspool of sexual misconduct allegations, racist chants and general toxicity men’s football can be, it feels as though we’re clutching at straws to try to make the women’s teams as offensive as male footballers have a reputation for being.

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