Cameroon is allowed to get upset without having to answer to your kids

Not every negative incident is a referendum on the women’s game or a bad example for little girls.

Cameroon came into its women’s World Cup round of 16 match against England as serious underdogs. The Indomitable Lionesses knew that they’d need to play their absolute best, and have a couple of lucky breaks go their way, to advance in the tournament. Instead, several big refereeing decisions went against them — a questionable backpass and two VAR reviews.

The Cameroonians felt hard done by the referees, visibly showed their frustration, and appeared to lose their composure completely by the end of the match, when they put in a series of overzealous and dangerous tackles.

Lost in all of this is that England is through to the World Cup quarterfinals. That’s not something you would know from a glance at the English press, though. An entire country’s worth of journalists and media outlets had little time for celebration of its team’s 3–0 victory, opting instead to devote all their energy to shaming Cameroon for being upset.

The full headlines on the game stories may be even more sensational, from the Guardian’s:

Cameroon’s shameful performance descends into playground farce

To the Telegraph’s:

The Cameroon team’s disgraceful VAR protests have damaged the reputation of women’s football

English journalists also ranted at Cameroon manager Alain Djeumfa at his press conference. Rather than ask questions, they took the opportunity to berate Djeumfa, telling him that his team shamed the sport of football and that his players were bad role models for children, while also accusing him of ordering his players not to give interviews.

It seems that footballers getting pissed off at a match not going their way can’t be simply left at that. Not when there are women to shame for failing to uphold the high ideals of sport, and more importantly, failing to be good role models for little girls.

After the match, England manager Phil Neville wondered aloud if Cameroon might have ruined the sport for millions of young women.

“This is going out worldwide. I didn’t enjoy it, the players didn’t enjoy it. My players kept their concentration fantastically, but those images are going out worldwide about how to act, the young girls playing all over the world that are seeing that behaviour. For me, it’s not right. My daughter wants to be a footballer and if she watches that she will think: ‘No, I want to play netball.’”

The men’s game is, of course, not held to this standard. Dirty tackles, abuse of the referee, and general disrespect for the laws of the game are fairly standard at all levels of men’s soccer across the world.

But don’t take my word for it, take it from ... Phil Neville! Apparently it did not bring the entire sport of football into disrepute when he intentionally fouled players hard. In the 2018 documentary The Feud — Ferguson vs. Wenger, Neville recalled a match in which him and his brother Gary played dirty to intimidate an Arsenal player.

“They had a young Spanish winger called Jose Antonio Reyes and we literally kicked him off the park,” Neville said.

Men’s football also found a way to go on after “The Battle Of Nürnburg,” a 2006 World Cup match in which 16 yellow cards and 4 reds were shown.

Later in that tournament, French midfielder and current Real Madrid manager Zinedine Zidane delivered a headbutt to Marco Materazzi after the Italy defender muttered a few unpleasant words about Zidane’s family. Rather than chastise Zidane for disgracing the sport, we’ve decided to memorialize this moment. Literally.

Men do catch criticism for misbehaving on the pitch. Luis Suárez, for instance, was rightfully taken to task for biting opponents on three separate occasions. But Suárez was never accused of damaging the reputation of the entirety of men’s football, nor was he ever told to think of all the little boys who might go play cricket instead after seeing his disgusting display.

Leaving aside this double standard for a moment, the circumstances that might have led to Cameroon becoming so emotional about calls going against them should also be explored and placed in the proper context.

Most of Cameroon’s players are not full-time professional footballers, and this was the biggest match almost all of them will ever play in. The team was completely inactive in 2017, and the federation scheduled just one friendly match in 2018. Cameroon has gotten to this point despite many of its players having little to no opportunities to improve as footballers or advance to the professional level.

If England had lost this match, its players would have returned to a league growing in both quality and financial muscle. Each member of the squad is a full-time professional making a living wage playing the game, and most will receive significant raises in the immediate future. Cameroon’s players are not as lucky. Many will go home to, as Cameroonian journalist Njie Enow describes it, an “underfunded domestic championship staged in appalling conditions.”

In such a context, the emotions of the Cameroon players are perfectly understandable, but it should still be noted that the Indomitable Lionesses were not actually hard done by. Given that the VAR decisions appeared correct and the referee let a few big transgressions go mostly unpunished, the Cameroonians weren’t justified in their indignation. If they believe the game was officiated in a manner that was unfair to them, they are wildly incorrect. And as Nigerian-English-American footballer Chioma Ubogagu noted, while Cameroon deserves more empathetic coverage, most of the players’ actions on the pitch were inexcusable.

But the problems with the discussion around Cameroon aren’t the criticisms of their behavior. One major issue is the complete failure to contextualize why Cameroon might be more emotional than the English press would consider “normal” or “acceptable.” The other is assigning Cameroon more responsibility to act a certain way than we’d ever burden a misbehaving men’s team with. They did not, as Neville and a half-dozen papers put it, damage the reputation of women’s soccer as a whole. The women’s game will move on past this one match and continue to grow, even while players behave in ways that self-appointed arbiters of morality deem distasteful.

Women are allowed to get pissed off at times. They shouldn’t be forced to first consider the message it might send to children. The Cameroon women’s national team does not have a responsibility to you, A Father Of Daughters, to raise your kids for you. And if, for god knows what reason, you do feel compelled to criticize women for getting pissed off, it’s probably worthwhile to consider why they might be so angry.