Oh, danger here!

IT’S THE END of the world as we know it.

Apparently. Tonight, ‘Match Of The Day’ will make a bit of television history in these islands when a female voice will be heard commentating on a football game for the first time. Jacqui Oatley, 32, makes the leap to the small screen after establishing her credentials on Radio Five Live but even before she takes the mic for Fulham v Blackburn, enraged critics of the move have lunged in, studs up, clearly intent on getting their retaliation in first.

It would be laughable if it wasn’t so pathetic. Take cartoon gaffer (sorry, ex-gaffer) Dave Bassett. “I am totally against it and everybody I know in football is totally against it,” he says. “The problem is that everybody is too scared to admit it. I knew this would happen eventually. The world of football is so politically correct these days. I’m completely relaxed about women presenting football shows. But commentating is different. You must have an understanding of the game and the tactics and I think in order to do that you need to have played the game.”

Is there no beginning to Dave’s foolishness? As an act of charity, let’s leave aside the great man’s self-styled bravery in speaking out on behalf of the cowed football family. Let’s also assume he didn’t hear about the heroic contributions of Big Ron and Mike Newell to the cause of political correctness. And, in his willingness to accept them as presenters but not commentators, let’s overlook the hoary old implication that women should be seen but not heard. (Perhaps the only small mercy is that he didn’t coin the slogan, ‘Totty, Not Motty’).

Yet even when we cut Davey boy as much undeserved slack as this, we are still left with the paradox that the man whose greatest contribution to the evolution of football tactics was Wimbledon’s Route One game, appears to suffer from the delusion that planet earth’s most popular sport is a particularly impenetrable branch of rocket science.

It is doubtless a source of wonder to Bassett that women have somehow managed to muddle through in a host of other less taxing disciplines, such as politics, journalism, art, science and medicine. Of course, getting to be a brain surgeon or a newspaper editor or a war correspondent or even a Prime Minister is one thing; mastery of the vast, mysterious complexity of 4-4-2 and “the holding midfielder” something else again.

Dave doesn’t specify to what level one needs to have played the game in order to have all the secrets of the football universe revealed to you. Which is probably just as well, since I’ve just Googled George Hamilton, John Motson, Clive Tyldesley, Martin Tyler and Trevor Welch and, would you believe it, they haven’t even got a Zenith Data Systems Cup loser’s medal between them. Nonetheless, most of the time, the lads somehow manage to keep tabs on complex events like goals, fouls, passes, corners, free-kicks and substitutions, although just in case they might ever get out of their depth, there is invariably close at hand the TV football equivalent of a bodyguard — the gnarled ex-pro — to provide such vital life-saving interjections as, “Lamps will be disappointed with that, John.”

Bassett’s blather boils down to one thing: football is a man’s, man’s, man’s, man’s world and he wants it to remain that way. Daily Male — sorry, Daily Mail — hack Steve Curry admits he too is from “the old school”, a time when “football press boxes and commentary positions were men-only locations and the thought of a female commenting on football was abhorrent.”

Since Julie Welch of the Observer broke the mould, Curry notes, somewhat sniffily, that “females on football in the written press have become greater in number but” — and somehow you always knew there was going to be a ‘but’ — “voice commentary is very different”.

Growing in righteous indignation, he squeaks: “It is an insult to the controlled commentaries of John Motson, Mike Ingham and Alan Green that their domain is threatened by a new arrival whose excited voice sounds like a fire siren”.

And, no, he doesn’t mean Jonathan Pearce. (In fact, come to think of it, should the bould Lawro get very excited, Jacqui Oatley might not even have the highest-pitched voice on ‘Match Of The Day’).

In the midst of all this risible twaddle, let’s hear it for Lawrie Sanchez. Welcoming Oatley to Craven Cottage for today’s game, the boss of Fulham and Northern Ireland says: “I am delighted for Jacqui as I have heard her many times on Radio Five Live and believe she is a commentator of great quality, whose knowledge of the game and its personnel is every bit as good as anyone else I’ve heard.”

It shouldn’t be a matter of celebration that basic common courtesy and encouragement is extended to someone about to take up a challenging new role but Sanchez’s remarks are a breath of fresh air.

To really appreciate how utterly daft this supposed controversy is, consider that while we all accept we can turn on our tv news to be informed by a woman that a gunman has just massacred 32 students at a university in Virginia, it seemingly remains a source of great unease for some that we might turn on our tv sport to be informed by a woman that Fulham have just won a corner. The scandal is not that a woman will commentate on MotD but that it has taken until 2007 for it to happen.

Meanwhile, Oatley herself has been keeping something of a low profile in the run-up to her small screen debut. Asked once about her worst ever job, she answered that it was student gig in a factory in Germany: “Mind-numbing work putting washers on a rotating machine whilst staring at the clock.” Fulham v Blackburn should hold no fears for her, so.

Bassett might also be interested to know Oatley was a keen amateur footballer whose playing days were brought to a premature end, at 27, by a dislocated kneecap and ruptured ligaments.

After that — to paraphrase Dennis Healy’s famous response to an attack on him by Geoffrey Howe in the House of Commons — Oatley is entitled to regard the bleatings of her critics as akin to being savaged by a dead sheep.