Sky Sports' football trailblazer Bianca Westwood opens up on tackling the trolls
After receiving abuse from football fans during her early stints as a Soccer Saturday reporter, Bianca Westwood didn't take long to discover searching her own name online was bad for her wellbeing.
Westwood was the only female reporter out on location when she started out on Soccer Saturday in 2012. The 49-year-old, who is preparing to go on tour with the show's former host Jeff Stelling, worked her way up the ranks before getting her chance on the Sky Sports broadcast but realised that didn't matter to some viewers.
These days, plenty of others have followed her lead, with the likes of Michelle Owen and Lynsey Hooper reporting from grounds up and down the country, and Westwood - who left Sky at the end of last season - is delighted by the progress. But when she started out it could be a lonely experience - with Troy Townsend and Kick it Out helping her ensure she made it through those tough times.
"I'd been behind the scenes on Soccer Saturday for about 10 years before I started match reporting, so I kind of worked my way up," Westwood explains to Mirror Football. "I started as an editorial assistant, assistant producer, and kind of kept badgering the executive producer Ian Condron to give me a chance, but as Clare Tomlinson was pretty much the only female football reporter, I think the powers that be were kind of like 'one's enough for now'.
"Back then, that was a pretty big deal for Sky to do that. I did think it was always going to be difficult for someone else to come through. Clare was absolutely brilliant and it never even entered my head to be a football reporter until I saw her in action, because when you're growing up, unless you have a role model to watch and look up to, if you don't see it you can't be it.
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"So as soon as I saw her doing it, that's what put the seed in my mind. Most of the females on screen at Sky were on Sky Sports News, they were all very glamorous anchorwomen, there wasn't really anyone else out in the field apart from Clare, but I was so used to being a football fan, being at matches, that was kind of the way I wanted it to go."
After working her way up through those behind-the-scene roles and smaller pieces to camera, Westwood was given the opportunity of shadowing Soccer Saturday favourite Chris Kamara as he former player showed how he operated in front of the camera. She also learned from other regulars on the show, including Alan McInally and Dickie Davies, quickly noticing "everyone has their own style".
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Bianca Westwood spent more than a decade as a stadium reporter on Soccer Saturday (Bianca Westwood/Youtube)That support, as well as support and banter from anchorman Stelling when she got up and running, made that transition from the background to the foreground easier. There were still challenges, of course - the lack of monitors at some of the lower-league grounds she was sent to, not to mention the wider challenge of doing live TV for the first time - but nothing prepared her for the abuse which followed.
"I obviously knew the game inside and out, I'd been watching it since I was six years old, and I thought I did okay on the first few, it was pretty quiet," she says. "But then for some reason there was this backlash online to having a female match reporter.
"I think Jacqui Oatley had done some commentary for Match of the Day a few years before and she received the same sort of treatment. But this was just when Twitter was starting to take off - I was really unprepared for that, I was unprepared for that focus and for the vitriol, quite honestly.
"It was really brutal, it was really harsh, and it was constant. So it kind of set me back quite a bit because I would start overthinking it and I wanted everything to be word-perfect. If you said 'erm' or if you stuttered slightly - which you do when you're just naturally talking, Kammy made a career basically out of missing who got sent off, which was hilarious and brilliant and funny, but if I made a slight error then it was like being thrown to the wolves."
Troy Townsend and Kick it Out offered support when the abuse was at its worst (Getty Images)Westwood recalls one fan campaign to get Sky to sack her, and while that went nowhere she still describes it as "a really hard time in my life". It was then that she turned to anti-discrimination group Kick it Out and their head of development Troy Townsend - father of England international Andros - for the support she needed.
"I didn't want to not do it because I didn't want to let them [the abusive viewers] win, but I also couldn't sleep the night before because I was so petrified, and it was a vicious circle because I'd get to the game and I hadn't slept so my brain wasn't working properly," Westwood recalls. "It kind of spiralled for a bit until I spoke to Troy Townsend at Kick It Out, because I wasn't really getting enough support.
"I don't think anybody really understood because I was kind of just starting out, but I wasn't getting much support elsewhere so I contacted Troy and he contacted Twitter and got them to take down all these accounts that had been terrorising me. So as they started to disappear, there were more voices being supportive and being like 'you had a good game today', and just that little bit of help.
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"What really used to annoy me wasn't people telling me I was ugly or I must have been sleeping with the producer or I was old or I wore too much make-up or not enough or whatever it might be, none of that really bothered me, it was when men were saying 'You know nothing about football'. That used to really p*** me off because it was like 'I've been watching this probably since before you were born'."
Westwood is pleased to see more women taking on regular sports reporting roles (Bianca Westwood/Youtube)These days, Westwood says the kind of abuse she struggled with in the past has become "water off a duck's back". Fans who run into her at matches will be full of kind words, but sometimes the manner of the praise prompts her to raise an eyebrow.
"it's really weird because now I'm seen as the standard-bearer of women's football reporting. I'll see fans at games and they'll be like 'you're the best, even better than some of the men' and they'll think that's a compliment, and I'll be like 'oh that's very sweet, thank you'," she says. "Then they'll say 'You're better than...' and they'll reel off all these female reporters, and I'll be like 'whoa, hold on a minute'.
"First of all it's not a competition between me and my female peers, but also everyone used to say all these things about me but now all of a sudden I'm accepted because I've been doing it so long. I'm not a new face and I'm not a new voice, and that's the only difference, really.
"It really helped as well when Michelle Owen was brought on, so I wasn't the only female then. People used to tweet me and say 'ohh there's another girl, she's going to take your job' or 'she's younger than you' or 'she's better than you'.
"They thought I'd be insecure about that or threatened by that but in all honesty I was just relieved. I was like 'thank god there's someone else that knows what I'm going through'. I think Michelle was brilliant straight away, but she still had her trolls like most people do - not even just women but men have trolls as well.
"You just have to give people a chance, whether they're male, female, they're from whatever diverse background, gender, sexuality, colour. It really is the fear of the unknown I think from some of the football fans out there, but most of them I'd say are really cool and supportive."
Soccer Saturday has made a number of changes, including the introduction of Simon Thomas as host (Robbie Jay Barratt - AMA/Getty Images))That fear of the unknown, sometimes less a fear and more a reflexive distrust, has played out more recently as Westwood and some of her peers have been replaced on Soccer Saturday. The most striking change comes in the studio, with Simon Thomas taking over after Stelling broadcast his final show in May, but the panelists and roving reporters have also changed.
There was plenty of opposition when a number of stalwarts of the panel moved on. The likes of Charlie Nicholas and Phil Thompson will join Westwood and Stelling on their upcoming live shows, having seen long spells as panelists brought to an end in recent years, but Westwood is at pains to point out even they weren't the original panel.
Before that group of ex-pros moved into the studio, there was a panel including Rodney Marsh and the late George Best, among others. Nicholas didn't join until 2000, while Paul Merson - one of the longest-serving panelists on the current show and a regular of the Stelling era - joined in 2006.
"Everything evolves and everything changes, it has to," Westwood says. "I remember when the first panel left there was a big uproar about it, and I got that, and I still get it because people like tradition and like to feel comfortable.
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You can catch Bianca and Jeff at the following venues"It was the same when I came in, it was something new, so when they started to bring in new characters and got rid of the old guard, I totally understood both sides of it because you do need to diversify, society is diverse and we have to reflect that, but I also understand that people like tuning in and seeing the same people and having the same banter and the same camaraderie. It's comfort, isn't it, and people love that.
"I do understand, people don't like change a lot of the time - especially football fans - because it's something that's so engrained in our culture, football, that when new things come along it feels like a threat even when half the time it's not, it's just something new. People probably thought at the time when [the first panelists] started to be phased out 'it will never be the same again'. But things evolve.
"You need to see new faces and you need to hear new voices, otherwise they wouldn't have brought me in in the first place and they wouldn't have brought in Sue Smith. So I kind of got it, but obviously people are going to say it's not the same, but you can't have the same format for the rest of time. You do unfortunately have to end, and that's what's happened - for me as well."
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