Taking the Wrong Line.

There’s a piece on the BBC sports website about Kadeja ‘Bunny’ Shaw, the Manchester City striker who is widely recognised as one of the best strikers in the women’s game, receiving ‘racist and misogynistic’ abuse on social media. The piece carries a statement from the Man City management expressing the usual outrage in the usual predictable terms: ‘There is no place for racism in our beautiful game and we will take all necessary steps to identify the culprits and punish them!’ and other similar platitudes. We’re seeing this kind of thing all the time now.

When are they going to realise that by taking this line they are only making matters worse because they’re letting the perpetrators know that their vomitous bile is having an effect? Social media has become huge now, and trolling comes with the territory. It’s as common as cow dung in the farmyard. So what can the players do about it?

Simple. They need to realise – and it shouldn’t take too much effort – that the women’s game has grown immensely and the top players are now basking in the limelight of celebrity. They are, by the societal perceptions of the day, highly successful people in their chosen field, whereas the perpetrators of abuse are sad little nobodies with nothing better to do. The perpetrators are also very much in the minority among the people who follow the sport.

So don’t publicise the abuse. Ignore it. And if they can’t ignore it, come off social media because it isn’t going to stop while it continues to be given big publicity and made to seem important.