Follow that vagina!
England Women vs France Women, UEFA Women’s European Championships Qualifier, St James’s Park, 31st May 2024
The season is over. The balls have been kicked into the long grass, the nets stretched out to dry in the summer sunshine. The players are all off sunning themselves in Dubai or downing Jägerbombs in Magaluf (or whatever football players do in the summer). Ahead of us stretches a football-less nullity. A soccer vacuum. A chasm, one who’s floor is barren, devoid of Association Football.1
But no!
Wait!
There’s an international match just up the road from us (relatively speaking) at St. James’ Park in Newcastle, England Women are playing France in a European qualifier! And with that, we manage to eke out the season by just one more game.
So we’re in the car heading back up the A19 under the Big Bear Beds van. Slowly. Very slowly. And we place the blame squarely at the feet of … Girls Aloud. Why? Well, in addition to the match, Girls Aloud are performing at Newcastle Arena, and the car park we would usually have used is - you’ve guessed it - right next to Newcastle Arena. So, we are instead resorting to using the only other car park in the vague vicinity that Ben knows how to get to, which is in Gateshead. The keen geographers amongst you will note that Gateshead is, in fact, on the other side of the Tyne to where we actually want to be. But we’ll quite literally cross that bridge when we eventually get to it. Which might not be for a while, with the roads being clogged with England fans, Girls Aloud fans and other people having the audacity to try and get home from work of a Friday evening.
When we eventually get there, the car park we successfully abandon our vehicle in for the evening is the one by The Glasshouse International Centre for Music.
‘Look!’ Says Ben, spotting a poster. ‘It’s Nils Frahm. In poster form’
Ben is particularly fond of Nils Frahm and his blending classical, electronica and piano innards played with toilet brushes. He’s playing The Glasshouse next month. And if Girls Aloud hadn’t clogged our usual car park, we’d never have known. See, it’s fate.2
With PHASE ONE of Operation: Attend The Football now complete, albeit somewhat behind schedule, all that remains is to get to the ground. By walking from Gateshead to Newcastle. We head down and over the Swing Bridge, and then follow the road away from the Quayside up towards the notorious Bigg Market.3
‘Do you know where we’re going?’ Liz asks nervously, as the streets thicken with pub-goers.
‘I do. Just follow that vagina,’ Ben says.
‘I’m sorry, what?’
Ben gestures to a man - presumably on his stag night - dressed as a 6-foot vagina and heading in the direction we want to go.
Ah yes, Newcastle. A place with over 1,000 years of history. The Jewel of the North East. The Pride of the Tyne. And a Mecca for stag parties, hen nights and people dressed as oversized comedy genitals.
We make it safely through the Bigg Market (losing the vagina en-route, much to Liz’s relief) through ‘the Toon’4 and over a small fence to the stadium.5
There isn’t much time for mooching about, but we’ve visited St. James’ Park several times before so we don’t need a pin badge. Thankfully we don’t need a scarf either, as the England scarves for sale in the official merchandise Portakabin are £20 each! Ben nearly passes out.
Then we enter the ground. Our seats are on level 7 of the Milburn Stand. What Liz has not quite realised is that Level 7 of the Milburn stand is up in the mesosphere and to reach it we need to climb approximately a million stairs. Liz nearly passes out.
It has to be said that we’ve seen a fair number of excellent views from football grounds this season (Prenton Park and the Emirates spring immediately to mind) but Newcastle is better than most.
Phoebe is with us today, so it’s a return of Phoebe’s Phood Corner - we’re hungry and Ben and Liz have a burger each which are quite pleasant, though disappointingly not served in a stottie.6 However Phoebe draws the short straw, opting for chicken nuggets and chips which aren’t great. Unable/unwilling to finish them, Father Of The Year Ben steps up. He concurs that they are indeed ‘not great’ (note that he needs to eat them all to reach this conclusion) and are in fact ‘like nuggets from a rubber chicken cooked yesterday’.
Oh yes, we’re here for a football match. Owing to Girls Aloud, parking in a different town and slow-moving, man-sized vaginas we’ve missed all the build up; the warm up, the pre-match entertainment, the team sheets, the lot. We arrive just in time for the flame throwers and the national anthems. As the teams run out, thankfully they read out who is who again. Ella Toon gets a particularly enthusiastic welcome to St. James’ Park!
The game is a fairly important one. After a bit of an unconvincing start to their qualifying campaign, England - who are the defending European Champions, of course - will be looking to make a bit of a statement here in front of a bumper crowd. In fact, it’s nearly full at St. James’ Park tonight - the official attendance figure is over 42,000. As is usual for women’s matches, it’s a less masculine crowd with more families. Two very excited small children behind us shriek with delight every time England have the ball in France’s half of the pitch, and isn’t that how football should be?
There’s a bit of a sour note early on for England as goalkeeper Mary Earps has to leave the pitch injured after only eight minutes. But things look a bit brighter by the half-hour mark when Beth Mead converts a Lauren Hemp cross at the Gallowgate End of the ground to make it 1-0. However, it’s a lead England can’t hold on to, and just before half time Elisa De Almeida stuns the home crowd with a volley from a corner to equalise for France.
And then it’s half time. Now, Liz has learnt her lesson from EVERY women’s match she has ever attended. DON’T QUEUE FOR THE LADIES TOILETS AT HALF TIME. And tonight, her caution is justified. Ben, braving the gents, describes the queue for the ladies facilities as ‘toilet armageddon.’ Oh, you don’t have to tell us - Britain’s football stadia were built for men’s matches. They’re a masculine domain, swarming with urinals. But if you’re going to stage top level women’s games in them YOU’VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT THE RIDICULOUSLY INEQUITABLE PROVISION OF WOMEN’S TOILETS. West Ham have the right idea (not a sentence you’ll often see us type). They have toilets that can be switched between genders, so if the crowd is 70% women, then 70% of the toilets can also be for women - an Olympic toilet legacy. St. James’ Park has no such provision and the queue fills the concourse. There are even women using the men’s toilets - and that means they’re really desperate. It takes Phoebe over 25 minutes to get through the queue. She misses the first ten minutes of the second half. It’s not good enough!
Anyway, into the 2nd half and the crowd try to energise the England team in the hopes that they’ll re-take the lead. Despite an encouraging start to the half and looking the better team, England seem below par. It’s a laboured, disjointed performance and, as is so often the case in football, the away team take full advantage. In the 69th minute Marie-Antoinette Katoto gives France the lead and St James’ Park falls silent. Unable to lift themselves, England can’t break down the France defence and the game finished 1-2. It’s a significant defeat for England, and one that makes the reverse fixture in France a must-win.
After the match, our walk back to the car is interesting. We have to pass back through the Bigg Market again just as the Friday night party is getting ‘properly started’. It’s a pleasant night, so there are plenty of people enjoying a beverage or 3 outside. Amidst the intoxicated festivities, a middle-aged woman in a wheelchair clutching a pint-can of Stella Artois rolls across our path.
She directs a sudden, earsplitting shout of ‘Leave it, Courtney!’ at another woman who is moving across the marketplace with a certain determination which seems to suggest she is unlikely to, in fact ‘leave it’.
Further cries of ‘LEAVE IT COURTNEY SHE’S NOT WORTH IT! COURTNEY MAN!’ pierce the night air behind us as we hurry back to the Quayside and over the Swing Bridge to the relative safety of the Gateshead side of the Tyne.
The views over the river are awesome, but we’re pleased to be heading home.
After an unremarkable drive back to Teesside it’s straight home and to bed - to dream about giant vaginas, rubber chicken and Nils Frahm. We wonder if England can do the business next week in France7 and how long it took all of those Girls Aloud fans to get out of the multi-story car park next to the Arena.
And we wonder if Courtney left it.
Well, until the Euros start in a fortnight.
I’ve bought tickets :-) Ben.
A notoriously riotous area for nights out. Not that either of us have firsthand experience of this.
Local slang for ‘the Town’ and also nickname for Newcastle United.
‘Over a fence’ didn’t seem the most sensible route, but it was the most direct and everybody else was going that way too.
For the uninitiated, a kind of flat-bottomed bread bun from Newcastle.
They do! With a 2-1 win.