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Beyond the Pitch Episode 98: The Hidden Game: COPA 71- Episode 5: The 50-Year Fight for Women’s Football with David Goldblatt:
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Thank you for joining Briony, Raj and special guest- football historian and writer David Goldblatt on todays episode.
David has spent years uncovering the untold stories of football history, and his work on BBC Copa ’71 docummentary brings to light a tournament that was buried for decades. In this episode, we’ll explore the historical ban on women’s football, the stories behind the documentary, and how media narratives have shaped the women’s game—both then and now.
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Transcript
Introduction to Beyond the Pitch
00:00:07
Speaker
podcast network Hello and welcome to Beyond the Pitch, a daily women's football podcast brought to you by the Global Sports Podcast Network.
About the Hidden Game series
00:00:17
Speaker
Today, we bring you our fifth episode of the Hidden Game series. It's brought to you by myself, Bryony, and my co-host Raj. How are we doing? Hello all. Yeah, very well. Thank you so.
00:00:28
Speaker
Jäger, thank you.
Guest Introduction: David Goldblatt
00:00:29
Speaker
We are in fact joined today by special de guest David Goldblatt. Would you like to introduce yourself? Really excited to have you here today. Well, thanks very much for having me. Excited to be here. I'm a football historian and a football writer.
00:00:45
Speaker
Thank you for coming on. Obviously you spent more time than us kind of uncovering these untold stories of the football history and done the a little bit of work on around the co-perceivity one and be interesting to speak to to, you know, bring to light the tournament and how it was buried for the decades, it has been
Exploring Historical Ban on Women's Football
00:01:02
Speaker
kind of thing. And in this episode specifically, we will explore the historical ban on women's football, the stories behind the documentary and how the media narratives have shaped the women's game, both then and in comparison to now. So we'll move straight to you first, David. So in myself and Raj recently, we were having this conversation around
00:01:24
Speaker
the spark of the ban initially on women's football in 1921 and we're interested to hear from you. Can you clarify for us, the there was the ban in 21 and then there was the, you know, where was the line in terms of women then being able to go on and play in Copa and train back on was or wasn't it affiliated football grounds?
00:01:45
Speaker
So there's I think there's a certain amount of misunderstanding around the concept of the ban. And some people hear that and think women are somehow not allowed to play football. And the Football Association, powerful and sovereign as it might be, doesn't actually have the power to stop women playing football.
00:02:05
Speaker
what it did have the power to do was to say to affiliated football clubs, so clubs that were members of the Football Association, you are not allowed to allow women to play on your pitches, nor are you allowed to have a women's team or to play in any sense a women's team.
00:02:26
Speaker
So that given that the vast majority of football coaching, football facilities and football pitches were in the hands of FA affiliated clubs, it effectively excludes women from playing football in an organized fashion. So after 1921, women still played football,
00:02:48
Speaker
but they're playing in the margins. They're playing on kind of heathland. They're playing at the edge of the park. They're playing in municipal spaces. But without access to any of the organization or coaching or facilities that membership of the Football Association would bring. I mean, you do have a case in some countries further down the line where women really are banned from playing football. So in Brazil, for example, in the 1930s,
00:03:17
Speaker
women playing football is actually made a criminal offence. So we're not just in the realm of saying, you can't play on my pitch. We're saying, if you play football, then you're breaking the law. So that's a much more serious ban. That's actually really what a ban looks like. And the same was true in Italy under Mussolini's dictatorship in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
00:03:41
Speaker
So women carried on playing football, but they are excluded from what is now an exclusively masculine world of organised football. Yeah, Yeah, so that absolutely kind of clarifies our understanding of the ban because we were under the impression that it was more of a, how Brazil and Italy done it, but it was literally just kind of the FA trying to enforce their kind of dominance and saying, you can't do this, but actually you're not going to be criminalized for it. You just can't use our official pitches. But to my understanding, there were some rugby clubs that allowed the women to use the pitches. Is that correct? Not that I've heard of, but you know, I wouldn't be surprised. I mean,
00:04:36
Speaker
so fun that was a That was a big kind of mystery how they would have been banned and then got to Copa in 71
Televisia's Role in Women's World Cup 1971
00:04:47
Speaker
kind of thing. So in preparation for this World Cup, that's what they were doing, playing in parks, just playing anywhere they could, basically. And then how did it, I know obviously it was the Mexican association that said, look, we can make some money out of this.
00:05:05
Speaker
Let's put this tournament on kind of thing. How did the teams get invited? How did the tournament come about? Well, actually, the Mexican Football Federation wasn't involved was expressly told not to be involved by FIFA. people who made the ah ah tournament happen with a giant telecommunications company, Televisia.
00:05:32
Speaker
who were the dominant hegemonic TV radio newspaper group in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. And they owned the Azteca Stadium and the Estadio Jalisco in Guadalajara and therefore they were able to you know they didn't have to worry about what the Mexican Football Federation said or not because it was their stadiums. and stadium and Both of them had been used successfully
00:06:05
Speaker
at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics and had also staged many games at the men's World Cup in 1970. And Televisia thought we've got these great big stadiums, we haven't got much else going on in them over the outside of the men's football season.
00:06:25
Speaker
You know, why don't we have a women's football tournament? And they thought, you know, with great, you know, they would just sow ahead of the curve. They thought think there's something in this. You know, there was a small Mexican women's football scene. They could see that there were small scenes elsewhere. Why don't we put on a women's World Cup?
00:06:49
Speaker
So it was, know, it came out, it was a commercial operation and there was nothing that FIFA or the Mexican Football Federation could do about it. I mean, at that time, Televisia, you know, literally the government aside is the most powerful institution in in Mexico. So what Televisia says goes. Right. Interesting. So is it like equivalent to BBC here?
00:07:14
Speaker
No, because it's not a state corporation in any way. It was a private corporation founded by the Azcaraga family. it had very, very close links to the ruling PRI, who were the political party who'd been running Mexico for the previous 60 or 70 years. So it was very, very closely linked to the people who actually ran Mexico. Hence, they could do whatever they wanted, essentially. Exactly.
00:07:42
Speaker
Fantastic. That's really interesting, actually. And I mean, for you, David, in terms of if we go more onto the recording, the filming of the documentary, what would you say stood out to you most from your time? Producting and putting together that? Well, I mean, I should say, I mean, I didn't really put it together. I'm just a talking head. you know I was interviewed by James Erskine, who was, you know, the director. What occurred to me?
00:08:12
Speaker
The first thing was seeing the footage for the first time and um giving praise and thanks that Televisia kept all the film. i mean So much stuff like this, you know the film gets lost. i mean I've recently been researching a football soap opera that the BBC ran in the mid 1960s to try and get some of Coronation Street's audience. It was called United and it ran for two years and it was like 140 episodes.
00:08:41
Speaker
and not a single episode has survived because the BBC used to just tuck chuck the tape away or like record something else over it because they were full of tape. But Televisia have a fabulous film library so they had an incredible collection of course all of the games but all of the you know all of the news footage, all of the promotional footage that they shot. And they're a serious television company. I mean, in some ways, you know, in terms of staging television spectacles way ahead of the BBC or european European television. So I was really blown away by just like how much they kept and how grateful I was that they kept it.
00:09:27
Speaker
I was really struck, um perhaps you were when you watched it, by the incredible colour palette of the um of the film at the time. you know it's a very It's almost sort of like Technicolor with incredibly deep tones of sort of red against really bleached out, intense Mexican sunshine. I thought that was pretty just looked really amazing. And I was struck by how much time, how much effort, how much money Televisia put into promoting the event.
00:10:00
Speaker
You know, they didn't just invite people and put it on. It's like, we are going to fill the Azteca. And, you know, there was all of the ancillary stuff that you have around any football tournament, you know, the posters, you know, the interviews with players on the news, know, all the background stories.
00:10:20
Speaker
I'm checking in with the training camp, interviews with the fans, all of that stuff. you know They did absolutely brilliantly. I mean, better, I would say, than any women's World Cup until we get to sort of literally 2011, 2015. I mean, they're 40 years ahead of everybody else.
00:10:40
Speaker
And I thought they struck a pretty good tone, given that it's Mexico in 1971. You know, the focus is on the women as players, you know, they're not being treated as kind of, you know, Dollybirds. They're being treated as serious athletes and the language that's used and the format that's used. It's all very close to the way in which men's football would have been covered in Mexico at the time. So I thought that was really interesting.
00:11:10
Speaker
the crowds. Oh my God, it's 1971, and there's 120,000 people in the Azteca to see Mexico, Mexican, Mexican women play, you know, Italy. I mean, that's just that's just amazing. That's just nothing that's topped it since, you know, everybody's going mad because Barcelona can get, you know, eighty nine thousand in the new camp or, you know, Arsenal women play and it's sixty one thousand at the Emirates. And that's great, you know, of course. But how incredible that in 1971
00:11:51
Speaker
that that should happen. It just does make one thing, oh boy, 40 wasted years. like There was the potential. you know What were FIFA and everybody else thinking? like You see that, you don't think, oh, maybe we should do something. So I was really, really struck by really struck by that.
00:12:17
Speaker
Honestly, that's so interesting that you say that because One of the first things that popped into my head when watching the documentary was the attendance, the crowd attendance. And just before I watched it, I'd been to Lioness versus USA at Wembley, and which they kept making the point of saying, sell out crowd, biggest crowd ever. And I think it was something like 89,000. And immediately I was like,
00:12:50
Speaker
Well, it's not, is it? It's not the biggest crowd ever we've had in women's football because we've got this documentary here with showing they filled an even bigger stadium. And it's bittersweet because I can't help to feel like you just said, 40 wasted years. If I had seen that as a child, it would have been so much more normalized that women's football is as big as men's football.
00:13:20
Speaker
and women in the 70s are playing football and being treated as athletes. And we've seen the training camps and growing up, I could have thought, do you know what? This is possible. But because there was absolutely none of that until the late 90s when the USA done it, do you think that when you've kind of just said it really, 40 wasted years, do you think football, women's football would be in a more progressive place now, had we have had access to that footage earlier? Of course. I mean, you know, plenty of other stuff would have had to have happened as well, to you know, to really bring change about because the scale of opposition and misogyny in the institutions of football was so huge. But yeah, it's a huge, it's a huge loss.
00:14:15
Speaker
You know, and it remains the case that FIFA still don't actually acknowledge that this is the first Women's World Cup, you know, and therefore all the records that everybody has discounted. I mean.
00:14:29
Speaker
I'm inclined to think, oh, well, you know, don't we all now know about it? And it's a great big fuck you every time you come up with some record or another. And we're all going, yeah, but what about Mexico 71? So, yeah you know, James, and I should also say racial doctors, who was the yeah co-producer with James of it, have just done us all a gigantic service by putting it by putting it out there. And it's good. Be a thorn. It's like a thorn in FIFA's side. Like, remember, remember, this is what you screwed up. This is what you didn't want to support. This is what you suppressed and hid. Ha! Exactly. And do you think they have any regret not getting there first?
00:15:19
Speaker
Well, you know, the people who were like in charge of FIFA at the time are all dead. You know, bless the Stanley Rouse, he's long gone. And she will have a lunch who soon followed afterwards.
00:15:31
Speaker
although somehow he made it to 100, is also dead. I mean, I don't know, does FIFA have regrets? That's not the style of the institution. That will, you know, assume a degree of critical self-reflection and humility that FIFA, as far as I can see, does not possess. So
Post-Tournament Neglect and Societal Dismissal
00:15:50
Speaker
the answer short answer to your question is no.
00:15:54
Speaker
No, no. Just to touch bases on that then in terms of the documentary, did you personally get to have interactions with or film in moments with the players who were given reflections of their experiences or was that not something that you got around to doing? Well, I mean, it's just not available. I'm just the talking head. That's all James's business. I mean, I was teaching in the United States at the time at a yeah liberal arts college.
00:16:21
Speaker
and he came over to film me and just came and filmed me one afternoon in the big lecture theatre and that's my whole involvement. wow australia And when you when you heard the accounts of the players, when you watched the documentary back and you heard kind of what they had to go through and then so they had the hype of being involved and being advertised and playing in the matches etc and then the aftermath of it. and Did that surprise you that they'd had the confidence to kind of go in there, play, be part of it? And theyd took they'd felt that high of being part of it, but it seems like no one really fought to continue it or to grow the game after that. And it just dropped off and they kind of never spoke to each other again.
00:17:17
Speaker
So I think, you know, there are lots and lots of great stories of the players. And the directors did an amazing job to track everybody down and and allow them their voice. But to really stand out for me, first of all, the Italian striker, Elena Sheva, I think you pronounce her surname. She is proof positive that women's football you know, would have been a gigantic hit if people had got on the case. What a player, what a character, what energy, what charisma, you know, tomonic demonic, demonic intensity. I mean, just what an incredible woman, an incredible player. I mean, she would have been a superstar.
00:18:07
Speaker
If she was playing today, she would be the never mind martyr. She would be the superstar of women's football. you know I mean, in a way, there are lots of great players and characters out there, but boy, could we do with her out there right now. um So she just blew me away. I absolutely loved her. I just think it's yeah, it's an indication of The tragedy of the situation that she came on in Italy, you know, was a bit more organized and a bit more together and less dismissive than England. But, you know, she's consigned to, you know, not even semi amateur, you know, just amate amateur football after the yeah after the high.
00:18:53
Speaker
The other story that really struck me was Carol Wilson, who's the youngest of the England team from the Northeast.
00:19:03
Speaker
and Wow, imagine being 16 or 17 or whatever it is and you've literally never left the country and suddenly you're at the Aztec up over England in front of 120,000 people. I mean, what a high. And that again makes the low on her return ah ah so, so sad. Not really to be forgotten.
00:19:26
Speaker
which is the fate of all of the women players. But as you'll remember, she and her father are invited to a charity dinner held by Newcastle United, who should to this day hang their heads in shame. And they invite her to this charity dinner, and she thinks that she's going to be celebrated. And the compare takes the piss out of her in front of everybody. And she never speaks of the time again until James finds her and interviews her. You know, 40 years more of silence. I mean, I just, you know, it's the movie. I'm sure you you felt something of this. It's on the one hand. It's, you know, so inspirational and so amazing. But
00:20:19
Speaker
boy, it makes you angry. yeah Yeah. And her story, above all, I think, you know, that's what really stands out for me, the cruelty, the cruelty to do that to a 17 year old a and the disdain and the contempt in which women's football is held by the male football institutions in the 1970s, man,
00:20:49
Speaker
That makes me cross. So to build on that point, would you say there was any in particular perspectives from these players that maybe changed your view on women's football at all? I think Schiavo from Italy changed it in just like recognising
00:21:10
Speaker
Uh, I don't know if I, I know of any woman footballer to this day who displays the demonic intensity of that woman on and off the pitch. so I think that's something everybody needs to check in with and everybody who has any doubts about the competitive quality of women's football seriously needs to check in with her. so I think that reinforced something that I felt,
00:21:37
Speaker
You know,
1971: Global Reach of Women's Football
00:21:38
Speaker
again, it was, you know, I suppose I was surprised that Mexico had such a big women's football scene in 1971. That was like news to me. I knew the Italians had a thing going. I knew that there was thing going on in England. But yeah, who knew from like Argentina women's football 1971? That was definitely that was news to me. So a sense that women's football still effectively underground you know was a more global phenomena in 1971 than I had hitherto imagined.
00:22:19
Speaker
I think it's really interesting as well from the perspective of what you were saying a moment ago about It is inspirational, but you know there's that anger that comes with it wherein, I think for me, it was watching the documentary and they talk about dealing with players, how they got off the plane, and they got back here and there was no one here. And they didn't speak about it again. They didn't speak to each other again until they come back together and they were filmed at a Lioness game. And for me, that was the saddest part about it was that they'd gone out and experienced such a groundbreaking moment in history together as a team.
00:22:54
Speaker
And then they went on not to speak for another 40 years after it. Yeah, really sad because that's a collective experience, you know, and you forge bonds with people under those circumstances that are kind of lifelong and intense and super meaningful. So, yeah, tragedy piled upon tragedy, injustice upon injustice.
00:23:16
Speaker
While we're on the subject of tragedy, one one thing that really stood out for me was the, initially, the reasons as to why women's football was banned in the first place. So for something the alumni's of women's having, having wombs and not being a correct structure to play football. And then there was of the players, Sharon, I think it was, being interviewed. And the man interviewing her just outright says to her, what's it a lovely girl like you, Sharon, playing a sport like football? And to which she replies, why, what's wrong with football? And he just kind of says, well, don't you want to be playing net netball or or hockey or something like that?
00:24:07
Speaker
and And that just really stood out for me because even today when we look at social media and we'll have comments under the likes of Ella Toon, Bunny Shaw, um um all of these kind of top players, Chloe Kelly,
00:24:32
Speaker
and She can't kick a ball, she needs to get back in the kitchen. Or doesn't she just want to play netball? Football's a man's game. And although we've made all this progression, I couldn't help to watch the documentary and just feel like we're still in the same place. Does that make sense? Yeah, I mean, we're not in the same place.
00:25:00
Speaker
But we are also still, as a society, shaped by attitudes and beliefs and assumptions that are now, I mean, they've been around, you know, since the 1860s and rewiring the culture and rewiring, in particular, men in English football. Like, did anyone think that was going to take place overnight? like
00:25:29
Speaker
look what you're dealing with. So I would um on the one hand, of course, it's like completely unbelievable that this kind of bullshit is still going on. And yet on the other hand, it's like entirely explicable. I mean, football, you know, football is invented and its earliest culture is created in all male institutions. English football,
00:25:58
Speaker
as we play, it is invented and codified by English public schools in the mid 19th century. And it is part of a wider cultural and educational project to shape a particular version of upper class English masculinity. You know, the job of the public schools, as they understand it in the mid 19th century, is to train a male elite that is equipped to rule the empire and that requires a kind of disciplined masculine warrior. And so women are completely excluded from that. You know, in the 19th century, the idea that women could fulfill that function, you know, socially, politically and athletically is completely and utterly implausible. And when
00:26:57
Speaker
that culture and that social class are displaced in football, which they are to a great extent from the 1870s when working class men and boys start playing football. You know, we have a shift of class, but attitudes on gender are no different. You know, football becomes a place where you can valorize not merely a kind of upper class version of warrior masculinity,
00:27:26
Speaker
but now also a particular version of working class, industrial, tough masculinity as well. So the entire game is completely suffused from its very, very beginning with those conceptions of what football is, what a football player is. And that's why it's so threatening when women start playing in the 1890s and then during the First World War.
Gender Dynamics in Football
00:27:54
Speaker
And of course, no surprise. I mean, as I've always argued, you know, the moment women anywhere get the opportunity to play football, they're just like boys and men. It's like they can't believe it. What? There was life before football. This is great. I want to play. Get me on the pitch. Football fever. And that's what's going on, you know, during the First World War when that generation above all of working class women get the opportunity for the first time to kick the ball around.
00:28:24
Speaker
So it runs very deep. And then, you know, you have this extraordinary flowering between 1916 and 1921 when women above all working in factories with access to works, football, and in an era where Victorian and Edwardian gender roles and gender ideology is disrupted by the demands of the war.
00:28:52
Speaker
You know, then the band comes and it's another 50 years of excluding women. And it becomes, you know, football is this, you know, super duper masculine world. And there are very few places, I would say, in kind of mid-century Britain, you know, with the exception, you know, the army is like that. The church is like that. And public schools are like that. And football is like, it's the last great act of gender segregation in British society.
00:29:22
Speaker
to exclude women from football. So it goes very, very, very deep. you know Football is a space in which certain kinds of masculinity are performed and celebrated. And when you've not seen anything else, you don't know anything else. And no one is coming along and going, really? you know Which is what football was for 100 years.
00:29:48
Speaker
No surprise that that kind of misogyny doesn't merely linger, but is kind of alive and well like a poisonous bacteria in the body of the football nation. I mean, you know, there's plenty of there outside football. Let's not kid ourselves. It's like not like football is the only space in British society where these kinds of attitudes are being expressed.
00:30:11
Speaker
But it has a, um because of this history, there's a whole kind of language of lazy critique and insult that is instantly available to any internet troll who wants to use it. So no surprise that it's that it's out there. I mean, kind of just taught to tie into it, I think we've covered a lot of it already on this podcast. we are unfortunately coming to the end of time on this one, but what would you
Copa 71: Mythic Stories Without Support
00:30:38
Speaker
say would be your top one or two takeaways from Copa as a whole of the tournament and the messages a documentary conveyed are that we need to continue to take forward and build upon in order to continue to see the growth of the women's game as it's going? I suppose the thing that I would, if it's a lesson I don't know, it's an observation.
00:31:04
Speaker
is that football, we love to play football, it's a great game, but what makes it the social and political and cultural phenomena that it is, is its capacity to generate and tell stories.
00:31:22
Speaker
to turn the everyday into the heroic, to make the quotidian mythical. That's what really, that's what takes it from being just a game into this whole other thing that it is now. And the women's football women's football has been denied that in many ways, you know, because to do that you have to have a whole body of people writing and thinking and engaging and turning the raw material of athletic performance into heroic narrative, because that's what stays in the mind. That's what really shapes the culture. And I thought Copernyte 71 showed just the unbelievable potency of women's football for mythic, heroic, transformatory stories.
00:32:16
Speaker
It had that in, it just had that in spades. And, you know, there were so many great twists and turns to every game. And, you know, I love the fact that the Mexicans basically you've got a bent referee making sure Mexico makes the final. But that's the kind of story it that makes men's football like we all love it. It's one of those things.
00:32:43
Speaker
As the cliche goes, we all hate to see that, but actually we all love to see that. That's exactly what we want to see. you know Again, it's like there are some moments you know when tempers seriously fray on the pitch. And again, yeah i you know I like that about it. It's like people really, really give a damn. you know Women's football,
00:33:08
Speaker
treads a complicated path. It doesn't want to be the men's game. It was doesn't want to replicate all a lot of its toxic masculinity. but it also you know Football is a game that demands a certain level of aggression. you know That's the nature of the game. It's a contact sport played at high speed in which emotions are for both participants and spectators are unnaturally raised, which is why it's such a buzz. And I thought it was just great to see that dimension of the game, particularly in the Mexico Italy game, but not only in that. And I thought, you know, let's not let's not sanitise things too much.
00:33:53
Speaker
was my was my feeling. you know Because that's the rough edges of football is part of what of what makes it you know the global game and why we can't get enough of it. So I took both of those. I suppose those who were my sort of big takeaways. And I suppose the third thing is You know, Televisia showed everybody 50 years ago now, like put some money in your best journalists and your editorial energy into making it a show and people will come and they will make stories out of it. So your hats off to Televisia, you know, who politically are not my, you know, not my blood brothers. But on this occasion, the boys done well.
00:34:42
Speaker
And they were boys, I have to say, for all of the all of the progressiveness of COPA 71. You know, the journalistic workforce, the television in 1971 looked pretty mild to me. And that's the thing, you know, there's a message. I mean, we need more women in the press books. You know, we're talking a lot rightly about, you know, we need more women coaches and we need more women in administrative positions.
00:35:10
Speaker
but we need more women in the press books getting coverage and getting opportunity in the men's game as well as in the women's game. Amazing. It's been really insightful actually to speak to you today. Really appreciate your time. My pleasure. It's lovely to be with you. Such a great thing to be in COPS 71, I can tell you. It's my yeah it's pretty much the peak of my broadcasting career such as it is. That's really interesting.
00:35:40
Speaker
David, thank you so much to hear your views and everything on on the whole of the documentary has been absolutely fantastic. And I love, I absolutely eat a love and agree with the end bit that you just said, like, don't take the passion out of the women's game, because that's what we play it for. Don't take the passion and the fire out of it. I'm quite the edge, you know, it's passion. It's like, you know, as well as I do, it's passion with an edge. I mean,
00:36:11
Speaker
Just as an example of that, I play I play in a three-sided walking football group. I know what a concept, but there it is. And, you know, football is meant to take all the kind of like toxicity out of football because, you know, you're walking, you can't be running and bashing, but I tell you, everybody still is. We're walking, but we're still absolutely on edge in our heads. We're all kind of gliding at high speed across, you know.
00:36:43
Speaker
yeah across the pitch at Old Trafford. And yeah, football's just so got that. Something about it that just fires all those neurons, even at walking pace.
00:36:55
Speaker
Do you know what? It's funny you say that because I was a coach with some kids today who I put into walking football just because of the weather conditions. And still have kids in fights over it. So it proves your point. You know, and so all those kind of slightly overweight, 65, 55 year old gentlemen who are on a weight loss program through ah it's the same, you know, I've seen they're having to introduce sin bins into into football, but I don't see that necessarily as a problem.
00:37:25
Speaker
I have to ask you before we go, David, what football team do you support? So my first love inherited from my grandfather and my father is Tottenham Hotspurs. you know, they're still my Premier League team and they keep me interested in the commercial circus. But for the last How long is it now? Twenty two years. I've been living in Bristol and I'm about 500 metres from the Memorial Stadium, home of the mighty Bristol Rovers and the gas, as they are colloquially referred to. That's the first score that I'm looking for these days. I love it. The only the only team in world football whose nickname is a state of matter. I just love that. No one else can claim that, right?
00:38:15
Speaker
done Brilliant. And on that note, I think that's a good time to wrap it up. And yeah thank you so much for for coming on. Really appreciate your time. And it's been fantastic. And I hope everyone
David Goldblatt's Online Presence
00:38:28
Speaker
enjoys this episode. David, where can we find you?
00:38:31
Speaker
on socials if you want to have a look into more of your research. I've gotten the count on on in Muskland, but like everybody else, I've had enough. So I'm on Blue Sky, you can find me there. I'm on Instagram, ah you can find me there.
00:38:49
Speaker
just putting gold black You'll find there's a few others, but I'm definitely not the immunologist that UCL and I'm not the dead, very famous South African photographer of the same name. And I'm not the weird guy in California who can't stop tweeting about the group client computer language on Facebook. So given that feel to work out who I am.
00:39:14
Speaker
all right good re Okay, thanks very much guys, much appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening and we will welcome you back to our next episode where we will wrap up this series next Friday to see you all then. Thank you very much.