POSTER BOYS: (From left to right) Beckham, Raul, Henry, Nistelrooy, Zidane and Totti.

Beckham, Totti, Owen or Raul. Who is the fairest of them all? Hmmm. Difficult question, judging only from the posters lining the walls of Rimita Sen’s one-room apartment on Calcutta’s Lake Avenue. Each of them flaunts a football legend, ponytailed, tattooed, flex-thighed, shiny-muscled, high-kicking or gazing movie-star style into the camera. With Euro 2004 entering its last leg next week, Sen’s football fever is at its peak.

In Calcutta to look for a job, this 24-year-old postgraduate from Guwahati is living it up at night watching football with a group of girlfriends, mostly ex-students from Shillong’s North-Eastern Hill University. Football regalia dot her room including an England jersey pinned to her softboard. “My cousin in Liverpool sent me this,” says Sen. “I told him — no chocolates, no deos, no sweaters. Just get me a jersey that I can wear while I am cheering for Beckham and Owen.” Which she did with a lost of zest till England crashed out of the tournament two days ago. But will she give up watching the tournament? “No way. I still have two other players to cheer for — Portugal’s Rui Costa and Figo.” So, till Euro 2004 concludes on July 4, she will live on a diet of football.

That, and Castle Lager. “How can you watch football without beer?” asks Sylvia Yambem, Sen’s football pal. “We have done everything within our means to build the atmosphere, you see. We also downloaded a few football songs from the Net and sang ‘Come On England’ out loud when our favourite stars were in action. Now, we are trying to get a few more to sing for Portugal. And we are having a ball — even without the boys.”

An all-girl party of beer and Beckham. Photo: Subhendu Chaki Location courtesy: HHI

Sen and Yambem are not the only girls — without boys — who are donning the colours of football this season. You don’t have to look very hard to find them in coffee shops, pubs, hostels or even your own drawing room — alone or in clusters — watching their favourite players and screaming themselves hoarse. No one’s surprised any more to find a Euro timetable sticking out of a woman’s handbag. And nobody frowns when he bumps into a group of eager young things, beer and cigarettes in hand, huddling before a giant screen in the dead of the night. Call it a miracle or a revolution, football (or is it footballers?) is now winning female hearts everywhere.

Like that of Rashmi Singh, a medical transcriptionist in Bangalore, who lives with 20 other girls in a hostel in Koramangala, a posh locality. The corridors in her hostel have been echoing with cries of “Zap it up Zidane” or “Beckham is the best” every night for the last two weeks. “Never mind that we have office in the mornings. It’s much more fun to watch the game in a large audience and we are having a great time,” says Singh.

“It is a welcome change and it augurs well for the game as well as the market,” says Himanshu Verma, head of corporate communications, ESPN, which is telecasting Euro 2004. “It would be wrong to say that they have toppled the old structure but women in India are taking to this tournament like never before.”

Suchi Sen, a former sports journalist, supports this view. “Even the 2002 World Cup had not made such a difference. This, in my opinion, is partly due to the influence of satellite TV. The rest is, of course, the advertiser’s magic touch. Packaging is the name of the game. The better you do it, the more loyalists you win,” concludes Suchi, who is now working with Football Marketing and Management International, a UK-based company.

She goes back to relate her experience at Soccerex, a promotional event, which she attended in Dubai in December last year. “There I met advertisers from the world over who were especially keen on selling European soccer in China and India. And their marketing strategies do not have a gender bias. There were products, especially football accessories, that were specifically designed to cater to the female taste. I am certain that our shopping malls will soon be flooded with Premier League T-shirts and football-shaped handbags,” she concludes.

If television and advertising have done their bit, so have the changes in gender equation, feels Professor Leena Chatterjee, teacher of behavioural sciences at IIM Calcutta. “I would say it’s our short-sightedness if we didn’t guess this change was inevitable. It’s natural that women in our country will respond to the revolution which is already changing the face of soccer in the West,” she argues.

Modern football is not just about the game, says Chatterjee. There are two important factors — celebrities and consumption. Therefore, the interest in the culture is not contained by the sport. “The most obvious example is David Beckham,” she points out. “And one can’t deny the impact of films like Bend it like Beckham or Footballers’ Wives, the popular TV series in the West. Our women, especially the younger ones, are not oblivious of these changes and they are waking up to those.”

That the X-brigade is bowled over by the footballers hardly needs confirmation but Linda Cranenburgh, an employee of Ogilvy and Mather (&M), Calcutta, provides it anyway. “Ninety minutes, packed with action, and some of the hottest men on one playground … does it sound any less thrilling than a Hollywood blockbuster? After all, what is football without the players? Of course I am watching it for the men who are playing,” she declares. “Some of them have marvellous physiques — as beautiful as sculptures in stone,” raves Priyanka Tikku, who works with ITC Sonar Bangla, Calcutta. “And the 90 minutes give you a full chance to admire that sculpture in action. I don’t know about the rules but it’s a delight to watch the players.”

And the delight is unmitigated by the absence of the Latinos. Some women fans swear by European footballers, even rating them a grade above the Latin American players. Like Aparna Muralidhar, a proofreader with Healthscribe, a medical transcription company in Bangalore. “European players are artistic. The Latin American players are more brash. They play football like rugby,” she comments while lamenting that Italy — comprising some of the “sexiest” footballers — has been washed out of the tournament. But if Totti is out of action, the Zidanes and Nistlerooys continue to provide the eye candy and are the subject of some lustful discussion even in the powder room. (Overheard in the ladies of a five-star hotel on the night of England’s debacle. First lady: “I’m here to watch the man with the golden cross.” Second lady: “Did you say golden crotch?”)

Not that it’s all about the bodies. Unlike the ‘football widows’ of yore, women who were completely sidelined by their ale-swigging, score-keeping male partners, today’s girls take care to be en courant with the formbook. They have to. As Rajeshwari Dasgupta, a copywriter with &M, Calcutta, says, “It doesn’t feel good if you can’t join in the conversation around you. So if you don’t want to lose face, be informed. Just switch on the TV or go to the Net — there’s loads of fundas for us.”

This change also has something to do with the ‘cleaning up’ of football’s ‘hooligan’ tag. “I always thought it was a rowdy game and all its fans equally boorish. But my whole idea changed when I visited London during one of the matches. They were young women, in tank tops and strappy sandals, in big numbers on every street corner. They were having good fun. I just loved watching them and wondered if my friends in India were doing the same,” says Sohini Mookherjee, who is completing her masters in Leeds, UK. “I was pleasantly surprised when they — all girls — recently SMS-ed me asking if I was watching the games.”

But while most feel it’s the stars who have made the tournament for most female spectators, there remain some voices of dissent — those who are die-hard followers of the world’s most popular sport. “I think it’s quite insulting to women who are seriously into the game,” objects Dipta Guha, a housewife who has been watching football ardently for the last 20 years. “There’s more to football than buying T-shirts and collecting posters. We understand the passion of the game as well as the offside rules. That surely counts for more, doesn’t it?”

Sure it does. But it doesn’t hurt that the best players are kinda pretty.