This week's guest is Anna Kessel, women’s sport editor with the Telegraph and author of Eat, Sweat, Play: How Sport Can Change Your Life. She also founded the organisation Women in Football, for which she was awarded an MBE.
We talk about a couple of the hideous experiences she had when starting out as a journalist, how the attitude to female sports reporters have changed in the subsequent 15 years...and how they haven’t.
We also talk about the progress made by women’s sport in the last few years - and her fear that the economic crisis caused by the Covid-19 pandemic will undermine most of that work - how women’s athletes are covered differently to male athletes, and why the perceived ambition to recognise women’s sport as solely ‘sport’ is not necessarily something to be aimed for.
Anna’s picks were: The Fan, by Hunter Davies; “Corruption and Abuse Still Block Women From Soccer” by Shireen Ahmed for Time Magazine; The work of Amy Lawrence and Don McRae; and Lyn Barber’s 2011 interview with Rafael Nadal for the Sunday Times.
Reminder to get in touch with us - email behindthelines@the42.ie, or tweet @gcooney93.
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