Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

There’s a reason women sell roof tiles in hotpants

Men and women are different, and if this were properly understood we all might have less of a problem

I would rather watch flies buzzing around a light bulb for two hours than Formula 1. At least the flies sometimes change direction and don’t jet off to Monaco as soon as they’ve finished. They just die, instead — an infinitely preferable denouement. The drivers used to die sometimes in Formula 1, which provided a modicum of interest on Grandstand of a Saturday afternoon, but that’s been excised from this thing which still gets called a ‘sport’ and seems to be run by nonagenarians and sleazebags.

So the news that Formula 1 is banning ‘grid girls’ rather passed me by. It had never occurred to me that the pouting chicks hanging around the tracks were paid to be there — I thought they were just the usual trollops who gather wherever handsomely remunerated young men are competing against one another, like dung beetles around a pillar of golden horseshit. Much as the young ladies who pursue, with great determination and avidity, footballers simply because they are footballers and are often later disappointed to have been treated as mere chattels and not properly valued for their very real identities as vibrant women. Groupies, they are called elsewhere.

I once mingled with the players after a pre-season friendly between Aldershot, then bottom of what we now call Division Two, and my team, Millwall, of the Championship. They all had their chicks with them. The Aldershot girls were rough as hell — basically rat-faced mingers to whom someone quite unqualified had stapled large plastic approximations of breasts, many of which hung out of their dresses in a baleful and vaguely threatening manner. The Millwall lasses, meanwhile, were several notches up the evolutionary scale and some — especially those appended to our highly paid forwards — were quite attractive. A sexist observation, of course, but nonetheless true.

The better you are at football, the more presentable the babe you’re likely to pull.

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