Don’t let woke spoil the Lionesses’ victory

England’s Lionesses have once again been crowned the queens of Europe. After a penalty shoot-out against Spain in Basel on Sunday, they raised the UEFA Women’s Euro trophy for the second tournament running. This was met with an outpouring of love and support back home. Unfortunately, as the girls celebrated the big win with cake and karaoke, a few smug voices online and in the media were already quietly shifting the goalposts.

For a small yet exceedingly irritating minority, lauding the Lionesses’ win was not enough. Instead, they set out to convince us that, given half the chance, the England women could give the world’s top male footballers a run for their money.

A post on X by TNT Sports last night made a direct comparison between shots made by England’s Chloe Kelly and Newcastle United’s Alexander Isak. Isak’s shot was the most powerful of the Premier League last season. Kelly’s winning penalty, TNT boasts, was ‘faster’ – by one kilometre per hour. Cue a Very Online debate, with intelligent contributions ranging from ‘You’re lying bastards’ to ‘I LOVE that men are so bitter about this’. The socials manager at TNT Sports, who almost certainly would have anticipated this reaction, is not exactly doing wonders for promoting the women’s game here. Reducing the beautiful game to a single cherry-picked stat doesn’t flatter the Lionesses – it flattens their achievements and the sport itself.

Similarly, a headline in the i instructs us to ‘Forget Bobby Moore’, the captain of the England team who won the World Cup in 1966. Instead, we’re invited to crown the Lionesses’ Leah Williamson the ‘greatest England captain of all time’. The argument, if you can call it that, is that ‘no England captain in history’, including Moore, ‘has won two major tournaments’. This achievement is, of course, testament to Williamson’s fantastic leadership. But the truth is that England’s men and women are competing in fundamentally different games.

The i article goes on to quote some of the players themselves, although none of them seems to share the author’s view. When talking about the England captain, midfielder Ella Toone doesn’t say, ‘Williamson’s better than all the men’s captains put together’. Instead, she describes her as a woman who ‘rallies the team, gets everyone going, keeps everyone together and leads by example in the way she plays’. Here, Toone captures what the rage-baiting headline fails to: that Leah Williamson is leading on her own terms and her own way. After all, she is a captain of a very different team from the England men’s side, playing a very different sport – and she does a bloody good job without us needing to bring out the man-sized yardstick to measure her against.

Reversing the sexes makes it clear just how silly this game is. Would we ever see a headline imploring us to ‘Forget Serena Williams, Novak Djokovic is the best tennis player of all time’ should the Djoker win another grand slam? No, we wouldn’t. Because we recognise that men and women have separate sporting categories for a reason. Without this, as recent attempts by sports to become ‘trans inclusive’ have so painfully shown, women would not get a fair shake.

As Williams herself once told an astonished David Letterman, men’s and women’s tennis are practically ‘two separate sports’. ‘If I were to play Andy Murray, I would lose’, she said. Why? Because men are ‘a lot faster’, and they ‘hit hard’. ‘I love to play women’s tennis’, she confessed, ‘and I only want to play girls because I don’t want to be embarrassed’. Of course, this doesn’t change the fact that Williams is an outstanding athlete – one of the greatest female tennis players of all time. Whether or not Andy Murray could best her on the court (spoiler alert: he could) has absolutely no bearing on this.

We can all agree that the Lionesses have shown the kind of grit, hunger and energy that the men’s team have been missing in recent years. But this was not the men’s Euros. This was a tournament for women and there is nothing wrong with that. Those holding up the Lionesses’ victory as a stick with which to beat the men’s side are turning what should be a celebration into petty point-scoring. Worse, these failed attempts to ‘empower’ women just end up sounding condescending.

These days, women’s football is flourishing like never before. It doesn’t need to piggy back off the men’s game. The Lionesses are inspiring enough on their own terms. Long may they reign.

Georgina Mumford is a spiked intern.