We Are Scottish Football
Julie McNeill, Luath, £7.99

THE publication of Julie McNeill’s new collection was perfectly timed to coincide with the Euros and future Women’s World Cup qualifiers. Its poetic focus may be on Scotland but its reach is global because football is global, as it has been since at least the 1950s as a male domain. 

In capitalist terms women’s football is being sponsored because it has brought to the market a new audience of young girls and women with a growing fan base — mums, aunts, grannies, sisters, dads, uncles, boy and girl friends. It has already created a new infrastructure of players, coaches, trainers, physios, managers, scouts, pitches, referees and football strips being sold with the names of female football stars.

It is to be welcomed — the poetry, the football and the expanse of working rights and popular sovereignty entailed — as another marker on the long road to women’s social, political, cultural inclusion through the kind of mass campaigning that brought equal pay and conditions to the Civil Service in 1955 and women teachers in 1961. 

Julie McNeill’s collection is both timely and well written by a fine poet: “She’s a silver-shoed striker/ a right foot crosser/ a beezer of a smile/ a ‘go the extra mile’/ a true team player/ a braw pie eater/ a cold weather warrior”, as she characterises her universal heroine. McNeill herself is Poet-in-Residence for St Mirren Football Club Charitable Trust, and Makar for The Hampden Collection which protects Scotland’s footballing heritage.

Her new collection points to a generational shift in both the sport and the poetry. Her collection acknowledges the popular roots of the male game while inflecting these through a modern female gaze. It contains photographs of old long-gone football parks spliced with those of young fearless women fans on the terraces standing amongst beer-drinking male supporters who are not bothering them or offering any offence. 

There is also a photo and poem about Rose Reilly, The Women Before Her, who won the French and Italian leagues and the Women’s World Cup for Italy in 1984. 

This collection thus offers women’s “herstory” and “poetry from below” which turns the page into present reality, but without losing sight of the real “presence” that women have had within the dominant male narratives of the past, from the Suffragettes to the women in the munition factories during the Great War. 

Such women came out of the home then too, and many resisted being stuck back into them again. Their granddaughters, the young women of today, are no longer stuck in them either, especially on training nights, Wednesday evenings and Saturday afternoons, shouting from the terraces or scoring the blooming goals themselves. 

And writing the poems and their own histories.