Sadly, we will not see a woman in a top-flight dugout any time soon

COMMENT: Kathryn Smith's Buffalo Bills' appointment has been little noticed here

Kathryn Smith has just been appointed assistant coach at NFL side the Buffalo Bills (AP)

The NFL encapsulates the white, male, conservative ethos of modern America better than any other sport. A study a few years ago showed that 83 per cent of people who identified themselves as part of its fan base were white, 64 per cent male and 51 per cent 45 years or older. Registered Republicans were 21 per cent more likely to be NFL fans than registered Democrats. All of which made the appointment last week of the league’s first female full-time coach – Kathryn Smith, at the Buffalo Bills – the more remarkable.

The appointment has been little noticed here. Our interest in NFL doesn’t seem to penetrate our national consciousness outside the Super Bowl, which will be contested between Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos next weekend. But Smith’s appointment as “special teams quality control coach” – charting plays, scouting blocking schemes and opposition kicking tactics – asks new questions of how long it will be before our own professional football makes such an appointment.

The absence of a single woman from the coaching staff of a single professional side is a crashing indictment of a one-eyed establishment.

It actually feels like some women share a resignation to this. Only one Women’s Super League team out of eight had a female coach last year – Emma Hayes at Chelsea – and though promoted Reading’s Kelly Chambers doubles the tally this season, it’s hardly a declaration of intent. All of Hayes’s coaching staff are men. So is the England coach. Dundee Ladies did not have a woman applicant when they recently advertised for a manager.

But the picture is far broader than that. The casual dismissal of the notion that a woman might be a more intelligent, inspirational or analytical addition to a coaching staff is rooted in prejudice: the same kind that still sometimes makes you flinch when a woman happens to ask the question at a press conference and you wonder what a particular unreconstructed manager sitting in front of us will have to say. Sexism and racism seem to carry different moral parameters.

You’ll even find a male squeamishness within the women’s game. One coach of a substantial women’s side lets it appear that his assistant is in charge because he feels the association would damage his reputation as an aspiring professional in the men’s game.

Women will tell you about two prevailing reactions to them. The “Andy Gray mentality” – after Gray’s mocking reaction to Sian Massey-Ellis running a line in which she displayed a perfect understanding of the offside rule. And the “well-meaning mentality”, typified by the recent conversation between a perfectly polite and deferential FA Council member and a woman who has become a senior administrator in the game. “Why ever don’t you just want to stay in women’s football?” Almost as maddening as the idea of positive discrimination, loathed by those arguing the women’s cause.

Massey-Ellis just tried to get on with developing her career as an official away from the circus which the dim-witted Gray fuelled. She was withdrawn from two non-league fixtures because of fears that the attention she attracted could detract from the match itself. But the absence of women emerging as potential officials in any great number reveals how far we remain from one running a top-flight game. It is six years since Amy Fearn became the first woman to referee a Football League game but she remains out on her own as a Level 2 official entitled to referee at that level. There are around eight Level 3 women, who could referee in Conference North or South.

Janie Frampton, the former referee who went on to become national referee manager in charge of all officials – male and female – in England argues that the absence of women in management roles is the problem. “With all respect to many men, they just don’t get it,” she said.

Yet it feels like the road to recognition will be from ground level – and will involve men championing women. It was Neil Warnock who argued the merits of the first woman Premier League physio, Sangi Patel, employing her at Crystal Palace and then QPR. (There have been good breakthroughs for women medical staff, particularly at semi-professional level, despite the blow for modernity and inclusion that the Eva Carneiro case represented.)

Kathryn Smith has found a similar way in at Buffalo. She’d worked for Bills coach Rex Ryan across the course of seven years, first as New York Jets’ personal players’ assistant when he worked there, then as an administrative assistant at Buffalo. So though Chelsea’s Hayes – whose side are reigning WSL champions – seems for all the world the prime candidate to cross the threshold, Annie Zaidi may be a name to look out for. She runs a junior age group at the Leicester City women’s team but her talent has also been spotted by Chris Ramsay and Les Ferdinand at QPR, where she has co-coached the Under-21s on a part-time basis. “You have to know your stuff and be prepared,” she says. “But there is no problem for the players.”

It proved impossible last week to reach either Hayes or Smith to discuss this subject, which shows how delicate it seems to be. Smith just wants to get on with it, said the NFL, seeking to avoid the circus which makes this threshold such a hard one to cross. Few of those fighting for the women’s cause disagree with the assessment that it might be 10 years before one of their number occupies a Premier League dugout in a coaching capacity.

Elite sport is out of touch with real heroes like John

It was in the early hours of Saturday that my friend John passed away. He was wise, funny, intelligent, uncomplaining, though he’d spent the last years of his life learning to live with Parkinson’s disease and all the indignities that brought.

Before the illness took away his dexterity and mobility, I’d played a small part in his efforts to raise money for a weekly event at a local leisure centre, offering swimming, pilates and exercise to those who suffered from Parkinson’s. We asked local companies for sponsorship and though he struggled to keep on top of the small details of his mission, he helped create what remains a hugely popular and therapeutic weekly event for dozens who need it.

John’s death came at the end of a week which brought more questions about who knew what about brown envelopes relating to a London 2017 athletics event which will cost tens of millions. Corporatised, alien, self-absorbed sport has lost touch with those who really need it.