Tag: guest blog

Following the triumphant (second) win for the Lionesses of the Women’s European Championship last weekend, we wanted to pay tribute to the team, as well as the loyal community of fans and supporters who have since been revelling in a much needed sense of joy and pride.

Poppy Hankin (Girl Ray) and Jof Owen (The Boy Least Likely To) – aka Bubble & Squeak – are two such loyal supporters and have been so dedicated, in fact, that they wrote a song in celebration of the Lionesses team. Whilst revelling in the team’s victories with a uplifting jangly energy, ‘Let’s Do It Again’ also playfully comments on the disparaging, misogynistic attitudes towards women’s football that seem to continue amongst certain groups of people.

We caught up with Poppy to find out more about her and Jof’s love of the Lionesses, the joy to be found in the community of supporters, and the inspirations behind the song. Read her guest blog below, watch the cheery video for ‘Let’s Do It Again‘, and then have a listen to her playlist of motivational football-accompanying anthems!

We’ve just got back from the victory parade at Buckingham Palace, and it feels like it’s finally sinking in. We actually did it. Again. The Lionesses won the Women’s European Championship for the second time, and we’d like to think, in some very small way, it was thanks to the silly football song we recorded for it.

I think one of the things I love about women’s football is the silliness around it. Of course, we take the football seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously. We like to have fun with the fandom. We saw so much of that out in Switzerland. There’s such a DIY spirit to it all, with badges and banners and outfits. Even screening events like She’s A Baller in London have that DIY riot grrrl punk spirit. You don’t really see that in the men’s game as much. I think it’s because the men’s game has always been officially endorsed in a way that the women’s game hasn’t. There have always been pubs and places showing it and proper outlets covering it. But there haven’t really been those official avenues for women’s football. Anything they wanted to happen, they kind of had to make it happen. I guess it has a DIY spirit because they literally had to do it themselves.

We designed our own T shirts and got them printed up before the tournament. Mine had a picture of the Teletubbies on but their faces had been replaced with Chloe Kelly, Lauren James, Ella Toone and Alessia Russo’s faces and on the TVs in their tummies it had an image of the moment when Kelly scored the goal in the last Euros final with “Kellytubbies… again again” written above it. Jof made a Hannah Hampton T shirt using the Hannah Montana logo and our girlfriends had ones that said “Lauren Hemp” with a weed leaf and “Tooney” in the Hooters owl font. We’re very creative.

Being a bit silly about anything that men take very seriously always feels subversive. That’s one of the reasons we wanted to record a football song I think. But also because we just love the Lionesses so much. We were at the last Euros final at Wembley in 2022 when they won, so we wanted to up our fan game even more this time around.

The idea for ‘Let’s Do It Again‘ came to us when we were in the pub watching Arsenal in the Women’s Champions League Final in May and we realised they didn’t have a cup song. Neither of us play football, but both our girlfriends do, so it feels like it’s almost our duty as WAGs to support footballers in whatever way we can.

Anyway, it was too late for us to write a song for Arsenal that night, but the Women’s European Championships were just around the corner, and we were already going out to Switzerland for some of the England games, so we figured it wasn’t too late to write one for them. We started writing the lyrics for it in the pub that night, and a week later we’d recorded it, and it was set to come out on the first day of the Euros.

We watched the first England game against France in a pub in Leytonstone. When we lost it was a bit crushing, after we’d been so excited in the weeks building up to it, but we were okay. Our friend Maeve ended up having an argument with some boys in the pub who were jeering at us when England lost. She was trying to say to them that women’s football wasn’t like that, and they were mansplaining football to us, saying how it’s all about tribalism and rivalry and you need to have that in football because that’s what makes it enjoyable.

But I think that maybe that’s just men’s football. It doesn’t feel that way in the women’s game, at least for us. I think it’s because the fans know the challenges that all the women players have had to face to get where they are, so they support women’s football as a whole, regardless of the team they’re in or where they come from. It’s about feminist solidarity. We still want our favourite teams to win, but that doesn’t mean we don’t respect and admire, and can’t be happy, for the other teams when they win instead. 

Following the Lionesses just feels a lot more wholesome, but not in a boring way. It feels very safe and joyous. It’s nice to be at a football match where we don’t feel out of place. The stadiums in Switzerland were full of people kind of like us and people who were just there to enjoy themselves. The other day, I heard a woman on a football podcast saying she’s a fan of the men’s football and the women’s football, but she missed the roar of men walking down the street and coming out of the pubs and that feeling of “danger” when she went to watch women’s football. She was saying she thought that was something they needed in the women’s game, but I don’t agree. That environment feels very intimidating for a lot of people.

It’s like an Oasis fan being at a Taylor Swift concert and moaning because the atmosphere is different and it isn’t like an Oasis concert, but that’s not a problem with the Taylor Swift concert. That’s just a problem with the Oasis fan. We like that it feels different, and we wouldn’t want it to feel like an Oasis concert. We’re at a Taylor Swift concert for a reason and we love the atmosphere. Women’s football almost feels like a completely different side of the sport sometimes. It’s like a different genre of football almost. Watching the Lionesses feels like being invited to the coolest party.

When we arrived in Zurich for the next England match against Netherlands, we really felt that solidarity. The fans were still really passionate about the teams they supported, but they could share the same space and be friendly and have fun sitting next to each other, regardless of their team.

It turns out the cheapest places to eat in Switzerland are the football stadiums too. Wine was about £8 a glass, beer was £6, and chips were only £4. Thank God. We could finally afford to eat! Also, they sell their hot dogs and their rolls separately. Fans would just hold the roll in one fist and the sausage in the other and take it in turns to take a bit out of each of them. Europeans are so wild and inspiring sometimes.

We’d been really worried in the lead up to the game against Netherlands that England might lose, and we’d just have to hang around in Switzerland for the next two weeks without them in the competition, so it was a huge relief when we won 4-0 that night. Also, watching the Netherlands fans singing ‘Links Rechts’ and dancing from left to right in the stadium was life changing. We really need to up our game with English football songs all round. Bubble & Squeak can’t do everything!

The locals were so nice to us in Zurich, giving us tips on where to buy cheap cheese and crisps and telling us the best swimming spots. On the first night we’d found a cool bar called Roter Delfin showing the Sweden vs Poland game and the woman who ran it told us that Oliwia Woś, who was playing in the match that we were watching, used to work at that bar.

After the England match, we went on to the Lionesses HQ fan park, which quite intense! I think maybe we’re passionate in a different way to some of the other England fans. We’re a bit quieter and a lot more awkward. We had a bag of our ‘My Bobby Moore is Leah Williamson’ stickers to give out, but we only managed to give out a few because we were too nervous to speak to the other fans. Hopefully next time Bubble & Squeak can play at the fan park though. It would be the dream gig for us.

After Zurich we went on to St. Gallen, ready for the Wales game on Sunday, and we went on 5 Live in the morning to sing our song and talk about being in Switzerland with some other fans. We even met the official Wales team poet, Sarah McCreadie. Then after the Wales game we took a few days off from football and went camping by a lake and went swimming and tried fishing and did wholesome things like pick wild strawberries and film TikToks in the mountains. In the evenings we’d cook our dinner on a camping stove and drink wine and watch the football on our laptop with all the Swiss people at the campsite crowded around watching it too.

St Gallen had been lovely if a little less exciting than Zurich. It didn’t seem to have caught Euros fever quite yet, but we did see Ceri Holland just wandering around the town during the day and three of the France team shopping in H&M. We watched the games in the suitably named Waaghaus. A makeshift event space with a giant TV screen, deckchairs, women’s football screen prints for sale and seemingly everyone in St Gallen who cared about watching the football. It was so lovely to be at there to celebrate with all the Switzerland fans when they went through to the quarter finals that night. It’s never the same if the host nation goes out in the group stages. Or so my girlfriend tells me. I was never really into football when I was younger, but she’s always played and watched it, so I’m learning these useful catchphrases and facts from her. It wasn’t until the Euros in 2022 that I started watching football and going to matches. I still can’t believe I’m a football fan travelling across Europe to follow the England team sometimes, but it has been nice to be able to celebrate something positive about where I come from for once.

I don’t think either of us would have ever imagined we’d write a football song for an England team. We usually support Wales because we’re both a quarter Welsh and I think we both naturally identify with underdogs more easily, but something about the Lionesses feels different. They’re such pop stars, and they’re all so funny and cool. This tournament has had so many iconic moments: Lucy Bronze taping her own leg up; Hannah Hampton saving a penalty with a tampon up her nose; Chloe Kelly’s celebrations; Alessio Russo sticking her finger in Ella Toone’s ear outside 10 Downing Street. It’s been beautiful.

We went down to Buckingham Palace on Tuesday to watch the victory parade, and it was amazing to see how much it’s grown again since we last won the Euros. There were only 7,000 people at Trafalgar Square at the victory parade in 2022, but there were 65,000 lined-up along the Mall this time. That’s so many people! In our song we’ve got a line where it says, “It’s such a shame that Lauren James and Aggie Beaver-Jones aren’t household names”, but I think we might need to re-write that for the World Cup, because I feel like everyone knows them now. The Lionesses winning feels so much bigger than just football. I think just for women to feel valued in sport generally is so important, for really young girls starting out but also for teenagers because it’s one of those things that when girls are 15 or 16, they get turned off sport because it’s just not a great time when you’re an adolescent with all these things going on in your life. I remember at school how a lot of girls stopped playing sports around that age. During adolescence, it’s just something that girls stop doing. They’ve got a heightened awareness of being judged by other people suddenly, mixed with an unhealthy lack of confidence and not feeling safe outside. It’s no surprise that girls who used to be really sporty stop playing altogether. I think the Lionesses have changed all that. Hopefully girls won’t feel shamed out of playing football now.

I know the Lionesses have changed both our lives forever and that’s a funny thing to think. I can’t believe we’re football fans with our own football anthem now, and we’ve driven all around Europe following a football team. Who knows what sport we’ll write a song about next. Basketball, hockey, curling…? There are so many places we could go with this. I have noticed there’s a women’s rugby tournament coming up.

Get the guitar, Squeak.

HUGE thanks to Poppy for writing about her love of the Lionesses for us, and to her and Jof for creating such an uplifting anthem in the form of ‘Let’s Do It Again’! I for one am looking forward to its rugby-inspired counterpart gracing our ears in the near future!

Watch the lyric video of ‘Let’s Do It Again’ here. And have a listen to Poppy’s motivational football-accompanying playlist here.