Jim Traynor said it himself during his football radio phone-in show on BBC Radio Scotland yesterday evening. The BBC is a public service broadcaster. Which will have struck many listeners yesterday as deeply ironic. Maybe as many as one in two.
Whether women's football in Scotland is low grade or not, Scotland's women football team was playing a vital game yesterday, yet BBC Radio Scotland's football programme yesterday afternoon (Sony Award-winning, even!) declined to make even passing reference to it.
As it is, the Scotland women's football team is not low grade and was yesterday involved in a must-win game in pursuit of a place at next year's World Cup.
Domestically, the game is growing from strength to strength. To take part in the Premier League, a club must have its players train (including strength and conditioning) four times a week. Not only are there no such pre-requisites in the men's game, but you would need to go pretty high up it to find its players committing to such an intensive training regime.
The BBC's seeming chauvinism was compounded by the paucity of yesterday's fixtures card. Only two men's Scottish Premier League games took place.
Ask any senior journalist or editor on the BBC Scotland's sports team and, chances are, you'll find their favourite club to be anyone but one of the country's top four or five. For them, football is more about winning games, and – arguably – rightly so.
But media coverage of women's sport in general, and women's football in particular, does seem to be guided more so by a quality test than their male equivalents. You'll find, for instance, many newspapers preferring to publish the Bundesliga (Germany) league table rather than the Scottish Women's Premier League one.
Oh, and Scotland defeated Greece, 4-1 – meriting a handsome match report, here. And another, here.
