WATCHING the Lionesses celebrating winning their place in the World Cup Final on Wednesday, I felt a sensation unfamiliar to me.
It was like my nose was running — but a bit higher up and bringing with it a feeling of happiness not generally associated with a summer cold.
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I was crying! I never cry. I only ever saw my dad cry once — when Prince, our Alsatian, died.
Why do the Lionesses make me cry?
Their confidence, not built on the quicksand of vanity.
Their refusal to be sex objects and/or victims at a time when the objectification and mental health of young women is at an all-time low.
Their effortless patriotism when we’ve been told for such a long time that it’s the dirtiest of words.
Their talent and teamwork at a time when the narcissistic and lonely life of the social influencer is held up as the surest way for ambitious girls to find fame.
Could the young Lionesses make the old Wags look any less relevant?
Having dreams, ambitions and passions that money can’t buy — and the self-respect that only paying your own way in life can bring — seems far more enviable than being the kept woman of a man who has to take off his boots in order to count up to 20.
If the Lionesses make Wags look bad, they make the male England players look worse.
These alleged LGBTQ allies — led by “gay icon” David Beckham — were last seen wafting off to Qatar to give good PR to a country where migrant workers are treated like chattels, women are treated like children and homosexuals are treated like criminals.
The Lionesses draw in multitudes turned off by the ugliness of the male game, with its inordinate share of spouse beaters, cat kickers and sexual assaulters within its ranks.
All that hype and money — and they haven’t been able to get into a World Cup final for more than half a century.
Football touches us because, more than any other sport, we can see the child inside the adult — the lack of accoutrements needed means that the poorest kid can access it.
When a player scores, they react with the joy of a child, as do their friends to their fleeting triumph.
It’s hard to see the exuberant kid in the over-paid and self-pitying male footballers — but very easy to see it in the Lionesses with their ponytails and bare-faced beauty.
Their names — Millie Bright, Lucy Bronze, Mary Earps — carry echoes of our Dickensian heritage while also sounding like super-heroines from the future.
They already sound like names on statues, even though they’re so young.
When the Lionesses speak, they conjure up a sense of community which the money-mad and globalist male game has lost.
And by community, I don’t just mean the country whose shirts they wear.
I mean a wider female community stretching back into the past — the “Lost Lionesses” of the 1971 Women’s World Cup — and reaching into the future.
Last year, when the Lionesses won the Uefa European Championship, I heard pre-teen girls yelling the players’ names, like war-cries while kicking a ball around on the public lawns at the end of my street.
This year I heard a little girl adorably singing “Three Lions wearing skirts” in the local Pizza Express.
This goes beyond football — it goes to the very heart of confidence for the next generation of teenage girls.
I wonder how many “tomboys” will be stopped from taking the sad journey to the surgeon’s scalpel now that the Lionesses have shown us such a bold new way of being feminine?
So I don’t really mind crying at long last, but I hope it stays limited to sport.
I don’t want to start imitating a fire hydrant every time I see an injured dog on Instagram or spontaneously sobbing during ghastly “girly chats”.
But, at 64, I finally understand why we get emotional when our team (and the Lionesses really are the first time I’ve thought of any team as being “mine”) wins — or loses, because either way, I can see myself snivelling lots tomorrow.
Not just because of what they represent for women’s football — but for women.
As the Terminator almost said: “Men — I know now why you cry.”
