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It has been claimed that the one place Englishness exists is on the sports field, and usually it is men’s sport that appears central to creating a sense of English national identity. However, in light of England’s sporting success across multiple women’s sports (namely cricket, netball, association football and rugby union), there warrants a need to begin to question the place of these female athletes in discussions of the nation. Drawing on extensive interview data with women who have represented England at sport, this paper seeks to ‘give a voice’ to these women whose experiences have often been ignored by both the popular press and academics alike. This research discusses the way in which English women represent their nation, both on the field of play and more broadly, and sheds light on the complexity of the intersections of gender and national identity. Attention is also paid to the role of women as warriors in the conventional sense. It is argued that, through playing international, representative sport, the women actively embody the nation, with national identity often overriding gendered identity in these instances. In this sense, they become proxy warriors for the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representation of female athletes by the British print media has been an area for close scrutiny since the mid-1990s. This article examines the representation of England’s Women’s performance at the 2009 Cricket World Cup. Using a qualitative content analysis of 29 articles from seven newspapers over the duration of the tournament, results show that the main themes emerging were: description of play, performance, celebration, media coverage and women’s sport. These results are discussed in the context of changing trends since the 1990s. Concurring with previous authors we acknowledge that trends have changed in terms of what is reported but not in terms of how much is reported. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The experiences of female sports fans have been largely marginalized in academic research. This article aims to bring women’s experiences as sports fans to the fore. It also explores assumptions of homogeneity which seem to underlie much research on male and female fans. This has perhaps led to a gendered binary whereby female sports fans are often depicted as ‘new consumer’ fans and are perceived as ‘inauthentic’ in their support. Drawing on Glaser and Strauss’s (2008) ‘grounded theory’ approach, 51 semi-structured interviews were conducted with female football fans in the East Midlands city of Leicester in England. This article focuses on two themes which emerged from this research: women, football and a sense of place; and women and stadium modernization. These findings begin to explore some of the complexities of female fan attachment and emphasize the need to examine the diversity of women’s experiences as sports fans. I propose that future research on sports fandom would benefit from a greater sensitivity to heterogeneity in both men’s and women’s experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]