Daybreak

The problem here is that you were watching daybreak which is designed for the moronic to have in in the background to get their not very powerful brains into gear.

Listen to Today on radio four and you may not have this problem again.

Part of the problem is that proportionately fewer girls and women than boys and men enjoy or value sport (not me as you can see from my username ) so they tend to assume that all females are like them. Interviewers are no different, thus the idiotic question. You only have to watch quiz programmes (Eggheads is just one example) when, as soon as the topic of sport comes up most of the female contestants haven't a clue.

So they can't get their heads round the fact that some of us prefer sport to shopping and don't think it is remotely impossible that an eight or nine year old girl could be excellent at her chosen sport or even - gosh wow, hold the front page - better than some boys.

Look no further than Mumsnet - where is the sports topic in the popular forums?

To be fair, most sports have gender segregation to ensure fair competition. If you didn't have men's and women's football, but only football, physical differences would mean that women couldn't compete at the top of the league and wouldn't be present in the sport at all.

That men's football secures bigger sponsorships and generates more money is a different issue. So that the girl is currently good enough to have been signed up, is an achievement, and shows just how good she really is. It's not sexist, or derogatory to point that out.

Yes Cogito, the "hook" was that it was a young girl excelling in a sport dominated by boys and men. That fact would have spoke for itself pretty clearly in the piece. That didn't mean, however the interviewer had to make such a patronising and undermining comment about her being "good enough" to "be allowed" to play with the boys. That sentence still suggests that she really only got the chance on sufferance (i.e. "allowed" - girls need to ask permission to do anything not designated as girly,right?) and that boys are still going to probably be inherently better than she will be.

The sex of the interviewer didn't surprise me, although I could see for the little girl at least that she might have hoped another woman might have been able to praise her without throwing in some comparison with boys, but hey ho, girls learn pretty damned early that they don't matter much!

That's awful.

How did Lily react?

The trouble is that it wouldn't rate a mention if it wasn't a girl. If a boy was being signed up for a junior team - which I'm sure they are by the dozen - it's not news. If the whole angle of the piece is gender, the scope for questions is limited. That said, that does sound like a particularly poor question. :)