“You can’t say that these days!” is a popular saying among mainly right-wing types who try to convince us that ‘they’, whoever ‘they’ are, usually the imaginary ‘liberal elite’, are banning free speech for mainly right-wing types. I don’t know about that. To all intents and purposes, I’m from the Council House elite and the last time I looked I was not engaging in the so called ‘Cancel Culture’ business. But – and there was always a big but, so to speak – the question of what free speech actually means is a vexed one.
Take the former footballer Eni Aluko. I am not particularly well acquainted with women’s football and choose not to watch it. That’s me, then: a fully-fledged sexist and misogynist bigot some might say but I would argue that I watch very little men’s football these days. because I am not interested. For that reason, I know little about Aluko, beyond the fact that she was a successful footballer, a privately educated lawyer, has a reputation as being somewhat litigious and is a terrible football pundit.
I make no comment about the legal issues between Aluko and Pound Shop polemicist Joey Barton because, frankly, I don’t want to run into legal problems myself and I am not remotely interested. But I do feel she has somewhat overstepped the mark with her astonishing attack on Ian Wright.
Aluko claims Wright has been “dominating” TV coverage, implying that the likes of Wright are “blocking’ the punditry pathway for female pundits. Yet, according to The Mirror, Wright has dominated broadcasting by being a pundit at all of one game in the 14 years since the women’s premier league came along with two matches at the women’s World Cup in 2023. What seems to have been missed here is that Ian Wright is actually a major advocate of women’s football, arguably the biggest advocate among men, and I reckon he will have encouraged more girls and women to play football than blocked anyone along the way.
I’ve heard Aluko as a pundit and I don’t think she is very good. When I have listened, she adds little or nothing to the picture, and nothing by way of technical analysis. But this is not because she is a black woman. Sex or colour doesn’t come into it with me. A pundit is either good or they’re not. The biggest question with Aluko, for me, is this: is she as bad a pundit as Steve McManaman, Glenn Hoddle, Lee Dixon or texter-in-chief Jermaine Jenas? I honestly don’t know because I haven’t heard as much of her work as I have with those four wretched pundits, but having a debate about who is the worst pundit isn’t a great place to be, is it?
Maybe Aluko engages her mouth before her formidable brain, something most of us are guilty of from time to time (and I certainly don’t have a formidable brain). But her attack on Wright, who has passionately argued for equal opportunities for girls and women in football, calling for government action, is absurd.
I feel uneasy as a white male blogger having a pop at a prominent black woman because I am alert enough to know that if I get the words wrong it will not be a good look. Yet to not say it would be a kind of betrayal to what I believe in and who I am. I don’t even like Arsenal but to me Ian Wright was everything I liked in a footballer and is, more importantly, everything I like in a human being. Aluko’s attack on him does her no favours and, given her background, smacks of elitism and even snobbery. I wish her well in her chosen field, of course, and that one day she becomes a high class football pundit like Ian Wright, as well as as powerful advocate for women’s football as he is.
You can’t say that these days. But I just said it.
