Should professional female sports teams have female coaches?

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Another sexism row hit the news last week in Britain, this time in sport. The previous manager of the increasingly successful women’s national football team, Mark Sampson, was forced out last year after a retiring black player said he had made ‘jokey’racists comments to her and other black team mates. Then suppressed reports by the Football Association that he had left his previous league club after sleeping with two of the girl players also surfaced, enough to get him sacked. The black player was a trained solicitor and she knew what she was doing on those race lines. She was not picked for the last World Cup and that’s when the tensions surfaced. With other sexism and diversity issues raging at the mostly white Football Association it was thought the next manager would be female or black, or both. The all female team at the FA tasked to find the new manager said they would leave no stone un-turned. They head hunted a small group of top coaches (both male and female) they thought would be interested and met the criteria and dealt with over 120 applications on top of that from more than 30 countries. They narrowed it down to four, two women and two men. But all the women fell by the wayside and they finally employed a man, Phillip Neville, a top class footballer and England player but very little management experience. One of the stipulations was top class management skills. In fact Phill had managed just one match, for Salford City, and that for a TV documentary. The feminist and female voices in the sport were in uproar. But as the fuss died down it emerged the two best women candidates dropped out late on as they said they didn’t want the pressure of the press scrutinizing their every move and digging through their past and present lives and social media comments etc. That would be so true as the press had been rifling through Phill Neville’s social media and found some jokey but negative sexist tweets toward women. “Relax I’m back chilled – just battered the wife!!! Feel better now!”, he tweeted in 2011. In 2012 he posted: “Morning men couple of hours cricket be4 work sets me up nicely for the day!” When asked why he failed to mention women, Neville wrote: “When I said morning men I thought the women would of been busy preparing breakfast/getting kids ready/making the beds – sorry morning women!” He amazingly survived that in the current febrile climate and now he is the England manager. But the women continued to rant but failed to admit that maybe the top women in the game simply didn’t want the job and so Neville was given the job instead? Women were in charge of appointing him, after all. The thing is Neville has no experience in the women’s game and will have to deal with a lot less banter and a lot more emotions as women are from a different planet than men when it comes to sport. How will he deal with the taboo of the period cycle and all manner of women’s issues around kids, school and women stuff. Believe it or not the team is not full of lesbians and very professional mix of tomboys, top league players and even married women. But, of course, if Phill wins the women’s world cup with his lack of management skills it going to make the women look very bad for not taking the job.