On Tuesday night, England played the USA in the semi-final of the Women’s World Cup. BBC viewing figures showed that it was the most-watched TV programme this year, with a peak of 11.7 million people tuning in, far more than Britain’s Got Talent. Another 1.7 million watched online. What I love most about this is the normalisation of the women’s game, the normalisation of women reporting and commentating on it, the normalisation of men watching it. Of course there have been those dark corners of Football Twitter where the dinosaurs and losers huddle together for warmth, making jokes about women getting back into the kitchen. The ones who are still stuck in the 1960s.

Let’s rewind right back to there. When I was in my teens, the manager of West Ham United, Ron Greenwood, was friendly with my parents. He knew I liked football (I kept quiet about my love of Spurs so as not to cause offence), and was a source of tickets for matches at Upton Park. One Saturday the whole family was invited. My father was whisked off to the boardroom, while my mother and I were ushered into the purdah of the ladies’ lounge with the players’ and directors’ wives. They might as well have shut us away in a drawer out of sight.

Football is a kind of universal language. It always was, but females were shut out of it and now they aren’t

Fast-forward a few years. “I’ve nothing against women but why must they always infiltrate?” bleated the elderly deputy sports editor of the Observer in 1973 when female journalists made moves to join the male-only Press Club. That was the year I became a football writer. My first match report was Coventry v Spurs. I phoned over my copy in the press room, and when I put the phone down I realised there was absolute silence. All the blokes had been listening. “That was very good,” said the one sitting next to me. He sounded a bit relieved. If truth be told, I felt relieved too. I knew men felt uncomfortable if a woman embarrassed herself. And it was very nice of him to have complimented me. Later, much later, like 40 years on from then, I thought, “What. The. Hell. Who was he to judge how I did my job?” What if the situation had been reversed? What if I’d told this condescending little twit his report was good?

A bit later, on a wintry Saturday afternoon I was shivering at Portman Road, Ipswich Town’s home ground, when the journo sitting behind me barked: “Women in the press box. Pah!” and the one next to him sniggered. I was shocked. It wasn’t his press box. Football was for everyone. Charles Buchan’s Football Monthly, which I read cover-to-cover as a girl, called it “our national game”. How could it be national if 50% of the population weren’t allowed to play it, report on it or have an opinion on it? But at the same time I worried terribly about upsetting all the men just by being there. The stands were always packed tight with males, as though a giant with a huge dustpan and brush had swept up every single one for miles around and emptied them into the stadium. It was so normal I never really thought about it. I was made to feel like the abnormal one. My offence was to invade a male space.

“Rather a weird girl,” commented Anthony Howard, an executive editor on the Observer, to my agent, the fierce and wonderful Pat Kavanagh. Pat scoffed at him but I was mortified. As I was when a reporter on the business section swanned up to me in the Cockpit, the Observer’s Saturday night pub. ‘You’re butch, aren’t you?’ he said smarmily. Everybody said I should have told him to fuck off but I was so taken aback I couldn’t say anything. What had I done wrong? Was I guilty of insufficient simpering?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Glorying in being good instead of having to apologise for being there’ … Megan Rapinoe during the quarter final between France and the USA. Photograph: Benoît Tessier/Reuters

It was not until I wrote a film, Those Glory Glory Days (1983), about my childhood love of Spurs, and received letters by the sackful, that I realised there were hundreds of women and girls like me, who passionately loved football but had always been made to feel that it was an outlandish thing for a female to be interested in.

Psychologists could explain better than I could why for girls being a player or reporter or supporter is a symbol of freedom. The women who do it just know how it feels. Watching football engages your emotions. Playing it makes you realise who you are. I’m starting work on a book about the pioneers of the women’s game, the ones who were around my age and played in the 1960s. Some Saturdays they couldn’t get a field because the men took the pitches. They had to change on buses or in toilets because there were no dressing rooms. “We just wanted to play,” one said. “I hated running. I still hate it. But when you’re running on the field it’s totally different. Step over that line, you changed. You weren’t a girl. You were a player.”

In the mid-1980s I took a 10-year break from Fleet Street to get married, have children and write books and scripts. When I returned to football reporting in the mid-90s, there were a few more of us in the press box. “It’s all your fault,” moaned one of the gentlemen of the press about this lamentable infiltration. “Oh dear, I’m really sorry,” I said. Imagine that. Imagine a man apologising for doing a job.

Meanwhile, I heard a familiar voice behind me. “Women in the press box! Pah!” The old crackpot was still going on about it. He was so enraged to see me again he drove a chair into my legs.

Fast-forward to now. I went to the opening Premier League game at the new Tottenham Hotspur stadium. It’s a mind-blowingly wonderful building. The walkway alongside the South Stand is a boulevard, it’s like La Rambla in Barcelona, a place where you can meet your friends. Among them are a lot of women because Spurs have always had a strong female following. I won’t go on about every single state-of-the-art attribute of this magical place but I have to mention the 471 toilets – 84% are for women. I was so thrilled, I tweeted photos. In the 1970s and 80s the provision of female loos at football grounds was not a priority. A helpful reporter from the Daily Mail called Jeff Powell would stand on guard outside the gents for me so I didn’t have to trek to some stinky shack the other side of the ground. Horrid or absent bogs were always a standard ploy for keeping women out of male spaces: “We don’t have the facilities,“ they’d say.

The fearless Megan Rapinoe embodies the best of America Read more

But back to the 2019 Women’s World Cup. These women look great. They’re confident and uninhibited. They’re not forced to be demure, or expected to make the sandwiches or told to shut up. Football is a kind of universal language. It always was; but females were shut out of it and now they aren’t.

Meg Rapinoe is the footballer I tuned in for. Rapinoe, who refused to sing the national anthem and said, “I’m not going to the fucking White House”, when asked what would happen if the US team were invited by the sleazy potentate in office. A magnificent two-fingered gesture to the patriarchy. If I was a girl now, she’s the woman I’d want to be. My favourite image of this tournament is the one of her, arms outstretched, triumphant, when she’d scored the second of her two goals in the quarter-final against France. Glorying in being good instead of having to apologise for being there. My hero.

• Julie Welch has worked on the Observer as a football reporter from 1973 to 1985. Her latest book, an updated version of The Biography of Tottenham Hotspur, will be published in late summer 2019