Is this beliveable? Click a picture to enhance it. Blue text = a clickable linkI can't think of any other time when I've seen such a crowd of people watch women's sport – or women's anything! And in addition there were all those fixated by telvision sets or live streams. The video below shows the highlights of the final of the Rugby Women's World Cup played at Eden Park, New Zealand, on Saturday the 12th of November 2022. It takes 7 minutes. Please play as much or as little of it as you like. It's the English version which is much less effusive and braggartly than the New Zealand commentary – yet very exciting. RefreshingRepected rugby writer Robert Kitson, after being at the game in Auckland, wrote in The Guardian: 'Everyone who attended the final left Eden Park saying the same things: the atmosphere was more family-friendly than the men’s equivalent, the players’ visible enjoyment and sense of adventure was delightfully infectious and the game itself had fewer stoppages, barely any box kicks and a refreshing lack of caterpillar rucks and reset scrums. In many ways it felt like a springboard to a new age of rugby enlightenment.' A milestone in women's sport in generalContributing to The Conversation, Holly Thorpe, Professor in Sociology of Sport and Gender at the University of Waikato wrote this: ‘Saturday night’s heart-stopping 34-31 Women’s Rugby World Cup victory by the New Zealand Black Ferns over England was more than a great game, it was a milestone in women’s sport in general.’
If men welcome the popularity of women's rugby – and going on the attendance at Eden Park many do – then we men may allow our core identity to soften somewhat because we now realise women can be as achievingly good as us, in a realm we thought was primarily ours. Maybe our sense of always being right and authoritative will therefore lose its edge. 'Bullishness' may be modifed. Let's see what happens over the next few years. TriumphI think the full house at Eden Park last Saturday was a triumph for women in New Zealand and recently I noticed another triumph. Maybe it doesn't have the glamour of a packed Eden Park, but it's a triumph nonetheless. I spotted it in a paragraph written by Michael Neilson in The New Zealand Herald on the 9th of November. He was writing about the makeup of the New Zealand Parliament: 'Gender balance was achieved after Soraya Peke-Mason was sworn in as Labour list MP, replacing outgoing Speaker Trevor Mallard, but the balance tipped after former Labour MP Gaurav Sharma resigned. There are currently 60 women MPs and 59 men.' That's highly significant isn't it? I think it stands alongside New Zealand women playing rugby to a full house at Eden Park. Certainly that’s my view as a New Zealand cis-gender male. I wonder what women think. □ John McInnes Friday 18 November 2022 ##########
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