I get a lot of what you are saying CJ but I'm afraid I don't agree with most of it. If you look at sports like darts, snooker or bowling then there's absolutely no reason men and women can't compete on an equal basis. In sports that require a degree of physicality though then men will always have a physical advantage (well, similarly trained men will; I'm sure any female athlete would hand any of us our sorry arses on a plate if we took them on!)
That's not misogyny, it's just biology.
If women were competing head to head with men of similar ability then I think in many sports they wouldn't even be close. Taking a fairly arbitrary example of the 100m, the fastest time ever recorded by a woman is 10.49 seconds by Florence Griffith-Joyner. That would put her around about the 6,300 mark in the men's table (figures courtesy of worldathletics.org). She can rightfully claim to be the fastest woman ever, but claiming to be the 6,300th fastest person ever carries far less cache. So where would the motivation or achievement be? A woman would almost certainly never stand a chance when running a 100m against male sprinters, they'd never make the podium and probably wouldn't even qualify. Who'd participate in a sport they couldn't win? All it would do is drive women out of sport.
OK, that's a fairly extreme example and in a lot of other sports it's probably a bit of a greyer area, but this one is nicely quantifiable for the sake of an example. I suspect you'd see similar things if you looked at throwing, jumping or lifting events.
To address one point you make in particular though:
I'll put my hands up here, I haven't watched the Cobblers Ladies play either, but I'm quite interested in doing so, I'd just rather do so sitting in a stadium than standing in a field. What I have watched though is the Cobblers girls sides as they used to play in the same league as my daughter's team.
And do you know what? They were bloody brilliant. Genuinely skillful players playing a good quality of football and really playing as a team. They were head and shoulders above every other team at that level and absolutely destroyed the opposition in every game they played. My daughter gave up playing (apparently football couldn't compete with slouching on a sofa watching TikTok videos and having inane facetime calls once she hit her teens) but I believe the Cobblers Girls team ended up playing in the boys league as it's the only way they could get a decent match.
I wouldn't be so quick to make snap judgements without seeing them as you may be surprised!
Having said all that, I wish the BBC would give women's football its own results page on their website as I'm fed up of scrolling past all the women's scores to get to the League 2 ones...
I think the take away from this section...is that women are rubbish at running!
Do agree, as stated previously, it would give the NTFC Ladies set up a more professional feel if they could play at a recognised ground or stadium, if not always at Sixfields.
Will try and get to Lye/Stourbridge for the next round...good place for a couple (that's just two!) ales.
