My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Girls With Balls is a highly interesting and entertaining read for many reasons. It is partly about female emancipation, partly about football, but all about people playing football for the love of the game and not for the money which seems to be the case nowadays with most footballers, or at least the players in the premier league as a rule.
The book is full of interesting characters such as the redoubtable Nettie Honeyball who sounds more like a James Bond girl than a pioneer of women’s football who was heavily involved with the British Ladies football club in the late 1890’s, Alfred Frankland who seemed to mastermind the most famous ladies football team of all time the Dick, Kerr Ladies and most of all the chain-smoking, swearing, Lily Parr who played for the team for more than 30 years in total scoring just under 1000 goals in the process.
Also of great interest in this book is the reasons why the FA decided to ban the women’s game from taking place on FA members grounds (such as the fact that the game was just not suitable for women to play as it could affect their abilities to bear children and also because it might cause them to become Lesbians), but also the fact that this didn’t stop these spirited women from playing the game that they loved!
I do love the historical comments about football causing women to become lesbians – a sound argument if ever I heard one!
They just seemed to me to be scared of how popular the game was amongst women and would have made up any excuse that they could have gotten away with.