English Triumph and Leftist Lament Part 2
Perhaps the most galling antipathy towards the English team came from The Guardian. On the 18th of July, the paper ran a piece by Anita Asante titled Lack of diversity in England Women squad will stop many girls from dreaming. The subtitle read Set-up of elite women’s football in England needs to change – and saying so is not a criticism of this squad or manager. The paper tells the reader who they must feel sorry for before they even begin to read the article. Dust off the violin.
Asante wrote, ‘Like England, France have reached the quarter-finals of Euro 2022 but unlike the Lionesses their 23-woman squad contains 15 black or brown players.’ Like Baptiste, Asante feels entitled to see non-whites overrepresented. Like Baptiste, Asante shows no concern for the absence of a white interest regarding such a displacement. The intent of Asante, Baptiste, and the like can easily be uncloaked. In the realm of sport at least, whites should be less visible than one would think, considering their population within a state. Minorities should have more visibility than their population within a state offers cause to expect. On this occasion, and as they do so often, The Guardian, which favours mass immigration, platformed someone eager to see the diminution of white demographics.
Asante points to cultural barriers in some black, Asian, and minority communities where ‘there are often a lot of different pressures for girls to conform to gender norms'. She states that British Cycling encouraged minorities to cycle. Asante suggests a similar approach in the football sphere. It would seem that she is not entirely against the assertion of liberal Western values over minority mores. Might this lead to a quasi-imperial practice of sorts? Is this not the kind of thing the left often call “racist’’? The invocation of cultural barriers counters her broader point, which blames football administrators for supposed representational issues.
The pronouncements of the diversity grievance mongers were not just untimely because they might have sewed disunity during a major tournament. The FA had already started to address accessibility issues in the women's game. During the competition, a Sky report revealed that the Premier League plans to invest more than £5m in a network of talent football centres over three years.
‘In 2020, the FA pledged to provide a well-signposted, inclusive and accessible club player pathway that supports talented girls and young women.
FA head of women's technical development Kay Cossington, said: "We've undertaken a lengthy and comprehensive review of the current pathway structure, and this has provided a clear future direction, based around five key areas of improvement, which all our new Emerging Talent Centres will embody.’’’
The FA had pledged to improve accessibility to the women’s game as far back as 2020. Comments made in mainstream outlets give an impression of ignored voices beseeching administrators who push in their earplugs to drown out the pleas of the marginalised. It would seem nothing could be further from the truth.
Harpur was aware of the initiative to broaden the pool of girls who can access opportunities in football. Her article (also discussed in part one) states that ‘as the women’s game grew, the FA tried to replicate the men’s game by having academy systems at club training grounds. There were once 52 centres of excellence. The competition for the programme was poor, however, so the FA cut 22 centres to concentrate the talent pool, leaving just 30 across the country.
‘Player development centres were formed to bridge the gap between grassroots football and centres of excellence. This increased competition but prevented some communities from accessing the talent system because they didn’t have the support to travel hours to sessions in green-belt areas.
‘To remedy this the FA announced changes to the domestic talent pathway structure by replacing regional talent centres (RTCs) with a wider national network of 70 emerging talents centres (ETCS), funded by the Premier League, for girls aged eight to 16.
‘With the increase in the number of local training environments, the aim is to double the players in the pathway from 1,722 to over 4,200 by the end of the 2023-24 season.’
So there we have it. The FA decided to cut twenty-two centres because the competition was poor, not because they wanted to exclude players based on their demographic. Since then, the FA has moved to provide access to those who live far away from training centres based in green-belt areas.
Harpur quotes Alisson Morrisey, a white working-class woman who had played the game. She said that opportunities were difficult to come by for players from poorer backgrounds. “If you had a bit of wealth, bigger opportunities were more accessible to you.’’
Hapur writes, ‘The talent pathway structure meant that to play for England, you had to play for a centre of excellence — but what did that mean for all the girls playing in cages, estates and parks?’
Such contempt was laid bare by the incapacity of a mainly white national team to pass the smell test in what stands for sections of polite society nowadays.
It took Harpur until near the end of her piece to acknowledge that this subject has clear socioeconomic and geographic aspects which are not race-specific. It is telling that even when quoting a white woman, Harpur does not deign to air an openly white-working-class interest in structural improvements to football. A two-tier system brazenly manifests. The identity politics of members of a minority group propagate along overtly racial lines. However, this is prohibited when it comes to whites.
Attempts to seek redress for a majority white team complement a broader leftist and globalist teleology. A white majority society is an obstacle to increased minority visibility. Therefore, an ethnic English problem remains to be solved. The ethnic majority must be displaced and made a minority among a motley of minorities. Such an event is probably desired by many who sneered at the Englishness of the England team. In Asante, we have an individual who openly celebrates the near whole displacement of whites in the France team and relishes the same in England. It should set alarm bells ringing that this sentiment was so clear.
Current demographic realities rebut Barbour and Harpur (see part one). Despite ongoing trends, Britain still retains a substantial white-British majority. It is this that makes an overwhelmingly white squad possible. When allied to non-race-specific socioeconomic and geographic factors, we find an explanation for the composition of the England team; this should have been central to Harpur’s piece, not supplementary. Cultural barriers may play a part too.
The comments of Barbour and Harpur gaslight to serve racial and political ambitions operating contrary to the ethnic interests of the majority.
It would have been politically expedient for the leftist and globalist constituency to ignore the matter. A large proportion of Harpur’s readership emphatically rejected her race-baiting. Her shot sailed way over the bar. In The Athletic comments section, the most popular replies trashed her efforts. Joey B wrote: ‘A majority white country has a team that’s mostly white? What’s the outrage for then?’
Jacob G stated: ‘Considering England have won their last two matches on an aggregate of 13-0. The players that have played those games and won by such a margin are clearly put into the team on merit and the results undoubtedly prove it. Pretty sour article, especially when they're performing well.’
David C said: ‘This article is a joke. Very disappointed that the equality of outcome doctrine has made it to the Athletic. Could it be just like the men's national team that its a meritocracy and race quite rightly doesn't come into it? I look forward to seeing a similar article about the lack of diversity in the women's 100m final.’
The views expressed by readers of The Athletic may be reflective of a broad rejection of the media-manufactured hysteria over the make-up of the England squad. The bad actors covered in this series have overreached. They have probably annoyed even people with liberal perspectives.
Harpur’s article has this phrase in its title: ‘They don’t look like me. It’s off-putting.’ We can imagine the predictable outrage that would have followed had this piece come from a white perspective. Why should whites not express a similar sentiment to Baptiste the next time some British institution or other calls for the diminishing influence of the people who gave rise to it?
Present UK demographics demonstrate that Olow’s piece in The Telegraph wrongly claimed black underrepresentation in the Women's Super League (WSL) (see part one). Baptise offers the most brazen instance of racial self-assertion discussed in the series. Nelson promoted a selfish in-group interest and volunteered her services in the cause of victimhood. The BBC wheeled Scott out as a mascot for a ''diversity'' agenda that regards whites with contempt. Such contempt was laid bare by the incapacity of a mainly white national team to pass the smell test in what stands for sections of polite society nowadays. The winning side offended the ‘woke’ zeitgeist. The hegemonic social, cultural, and political orthodoxy was driving comfortably along. The whiteness of the England line-up appeared like a giant sack of shit flung through its window. The usual suspects sought to gain what they could from this unwanted offering and converged on it like ravenous flies. They were desperate to extract political gain from the transgression that any instance of white homogeneity represents.
The correct response to the agitators highlighted in this series is to oppose them unequivocally. We should do this when such types assail the world of sports, politics, culture, media, art, etc. It stops when the majority stops it.
What if, like Baptise, more whites reveal an in-group preference and a desire for settings and institutions reflective of our heritage? One gets the sense such a development may gather momentum and thwart malevolent designs that plague our age.
‘‘Diversity is our strength,’’ they say. Seeing as England won Euro 2022 with a homogenous side, it may be that diversity is not always an unalloyed good. Maybe, people with a principle of unity derived from a common heritage and culture can do just fine on their own.
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References
Lack of diversity in England Women squad will stop many girls from dreaming | England women's football team | The Guardian
Premier League to invest more than £5m over three years in FA's new network of girls' football talent centres | Football News | Sky Sports
‘They don’t look like me. It’s off-putting’ – England women and a lack of non-white role models - The Athletic
BBC presenter Eilidh Barbour: England soccer team 'too white' (nypost.com)
BBC iPlayer - Alex Scott: The Future of Women’s Football
2011 Census analysis: Ethnicity and religion of the non-UK born population in England and Wales - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)
Only 10 to 15 per cent of players in the Women's Super League are black — what is life like for the minority? (telegraph.co.uk)