Women's football update

Yesterday Spurs got dumped out of the Champions' League, but it hasn't all been doom and gloom for the beautiful game. This may be an important week for women’s football, which regular readers will know I’ve long thought should get more support. Yesterday was the first day of the inaugural season of the Women’s Super League, which is the most professional women’s league my country has ever had. And as we all know, if you want something done well, you should get a professional. The WSL is receiving about three million pounds of investment from the Football Association, and everyone seems pretty pleased about it. Or at least, women seem to be pleased about it. Jose Mourinho and David Beckham don’t seem to have been asked.

The hope is that the WSL will be more competitive than the Women’s Premier League, which has been dominated by Arsenal for ages. The FA investment is being shared around so more clubs will be able to pay more women to be at least semi-professional. That’s a step in the right direction, though it’s still way off what goes on in the US. A more competitive league should increase standards all round, but Arsenal are still top of the WSL at the moment, of course. So we probably won’t win the World Cup this year, but maybe we’ll win Canada 2015. But we probably won't win that either, because we're really not putting very much money in. Sponsors don't seem to have been that taken with it and as a result the WSL is getting a lot less financial support than was initially hoped. So I'm pleased, but I'm only a little bit pleased. I still think we should give this a try.

Gareth Bale

I’m a Spurs fan so naturally I’m pleased that Bale’s having such a good run of form. I’m also bemused. Bale’s always been a promising young player but I’ve always seen him more in the category of players disappointingly but conspicuously failing to consistently live up to their potential, along with Ashley Young, Theo Walcott and the mindboggling Jermaine Jenas. He’s never struck me as the kind of player like Giggs or Rooney who are clearly the real deal and can be expected to play fabulously unless they pull a Tiger Woods and become suddenly incompetent for reasons firmly external to the game.

Given this, it’s hard for me to view Bale’s purple patch the way others seem to, namely as his apotheosis from Paul Konchesky into Ronaldinho, a transformation destined to happen the moment Harry relieved him of his defensive duties. That seems to me about as sensible as hailing Nani as the new Cristiano Ronaldo every time he does a stepover. If six months from now Bale is the same towering mediocrity who didn’t win any of his first 24 league games for Spurs then nobody should be surprised.

That’s why I’m not pleased about Bale’s apparent committal of his future to the club. We’re not short of wingers and if we sold him in January we’d get a huge fee which we could spend on some decent defenders who weren’t always crocked. That’d be much more use than what I expect him to turn back into, and I think we can all agree he’s quite likely never to have a pricetag higher than the one he’s got at the moment. Then again, if he keeps playing the way he's playing now then he might singlehandedly win us the Champions' League. I'd like that.