Women’s soccer can’t get its foot in door here

LONDON -- You don’t hear much about women’s soccer in England.

Then again, you don’t really hear all that much about rugby, cricket, golf or, come to think of it, anything about tennis, or curling, or even all that much about O.J., compared with how much you hear about the stupefyingly colossal English Premier League.

Even more than it can seem from afar, English Premier League football -- or “soccer,” for slang -- so dwarfs, devours and demolishes all other games that the next-favorite sport would seem to come in about 12th.

So as England approaches its biggest women’s match to date, a heady World Cup quarterfinal Saturday against the favored United States team in China, here’s the local football chatter:

Can you belieeeeve Jose Mourinho left Chelsea? I mean, the season’s just begun. Doesn’t this put Chelsea in a bind? And did they fire him, or did he resign, or was it really that mutual agreement thing? And will he really get a £25 million farewell payment?

(Points of information: Mourinho, a Portuguese maestro, managed the London soccer club Chelsea for three seasons-plus, won two titles, talked a lot and frequented subway ads. His departure vaguely resembles Phil Jackson’s leaving the Lakers, although his return seems implausible.)

In Godzilla’s shadow, the England-U.S. game did turn up on a few wagering websites. On William Hill, the “United States Ladies” got 4-7 odds while a wager on the “England Ladies” could fetch 4-1. Betfair had England at 5-1, and a spokesman said he’d heard nothing of it.

Then, too, women’s soccer in the birthplace of soccer still molts from mores long since debunked overseas. “Contrary to what the bloke down the pub has been saying, the English women’s football team is not rubbish,” the Independent’s Andy McSmith felt moved to write.

“Football is like the small-town, modern-day Ku Klux Klan meeting of misogyny,” Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian last fall after a second-division manager loosed a second-rate tirade about a female referee.

In that church of flowing wisdom, the pregame pub, it can be bracing for American ears to take in such earnest pearls as, “I don’t think women should be playing football.” In a country more modernized than America in various categories, England has no Title IX, no women’s Final Four, no scrutinized collegiate sports to sample on TV. It does revel in successful female Olympians.

Just as the U.S. Congress passed Title IX in 1972, English soccer’s governing body, the Football Assn., lifted a 50-year ban on women’s matches. Just as the Rose Bowl held 90,185 for a women’s soccer match in 1999, the FA declared its commitment that football would become the top female sport in England.

While that has transpired, a few note that the England men’s national team, the Premier League’s only captivation rival, luxuriates in lavish travel and compensation, while the women include midfielder Vicky Exley, the recipient of mild note because of her full-time job delivering mail in South Yorkshire.

“The two best-known women’s footballers in Britain are probably Keira Knightley and Parminder Nagra from ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ -- who are, um, actresses,” wrote Ros Wynne-Jones in the Daily Mirror. “And although excitement about the women’s team is slowly growing, it has yet to be embraced as wholeheartedly as, say, curling.”

It has budged, however, to where you can find discussions of actual World Cup play, which has aired on the BBC during the daytime, which prompted Martin Kelner to pen a semi-complimentary Guardian column noting that it trumped such daytime horror as “people buying properties in Spain, Barney or Dick Van Dyke being a detective.”

When there’s discussion, it often congeals to outright dismay if not physical illness at the caliber of goalkeeping, particularly with the Argentina squad that lost 11-0 to Germany and 6-1 to England and wrought such message-board commentary as, “Ocular evidence suggests that the standard of goalkeeping in women’s football is very bad.”

In his reprieve from property-buying programs, Kelner surmised that while young boys might choose teams strictly, girls seem “more likely to put an arm around an underperformer, dry her tears, and give her a place on the team anyway, possibly in goal.

“I may be generalising wildly, but this is the only explanation I can think of for the Swedish and Argentine keepers.”