Alison McConnell: Shelley Kerr's Scotland team are breaking down barriers

The nonsense he referenced was a classroom strike. A number of children had refused to take out their French books in protest at one member being denied entry into an S1 football tournament. Some bog-standard intimidation tactics ensured the strike was short-lived but I’m not sure its lesson ever did evaporate.

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As an adult it’s easy to forget the genuine rush of excitement and enthusiasm that the promise of something different to the daily routine brings. The day that news broke of the aforementioned tournament caused wide ripples of intrigue.

Classes had to decide and nominate who their six players were for the small sided games. There were days of deliberations. Of questions marks over the selection. Being invited to play was an honour difficult to articulate but it was the acceptance and encouragement of contemporaries that offered the greatest thrill. To be denied a place because of gender, on the say-so of a (male) PE teacher was indelibly bruising.

Thirty odd years on and the culture shift is staggering.

Just under 20,000 people packed out Hampden on Tuesday night to wave off Shelley Kerr’s side to the World Cup. New men’s team manager, Steve Clarke, at pains on the day of his appointment about his wish to emulate the achievements of the female squad, was in the dressing room after the game to offer encouragement. The First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, was there to add to the sense of the occasion.

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Closer to home, a talk at that very same high school for this summer’s incoming group of fresh-faced 11 and 12-year-olds earlier this month opened with a gushing speech from an S6 student who was effusive in her praise of the school for encouraging a burgeoning football career with her academic studies. One can only assume there has been a shift as radical in the PE department as there has been in our wider culture.

But that it can and does change is heartening.

Giant global sports firm Nike, never one to miss a marketing trick, unveiled their women’s World Cup ad with a slogan that read: “Don’t change your dream. Change the World.” There is no escaping the sense that these young athletes have contributed hugely to making perceptions shift.

For girls and young women it is difficult to underline the importance of visible role models. In an era when the drop-out rate from sport plummets when the teenage hormones start to kick in, it has never been more imperative to have available images of women excelling in any chosen sport or career of choice.

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They will not all make it to a World Cup. As news filtered through last week of how the news was delivered to the players heading to France for the tournament it was difficult not to think of those for whom the call did not come or who took a call to hear that there was no need to look out a passport.

But the cultural significance of women’s sporting achievements being held in genuine esteem, of sporting success held up for proper acknowledgement is important in a way that is difficult to overplay. The message contained in nearly 20,000 people turning up at Hampden on Tuesday night felt like a statement; about equality, value, social status.

That there are clear role models, that there is a pathway for a girl not just to enjoy a kickabout with other but to go on and take international recognition seems like unimaginable progress as minds are opened.

There will still be the snide, sarcastic comments. There will be a snootiness about the standard and a disdain from certain quarters but the more normalised it becomes, the more distant those voices will sound.

And for future generations there need not be a creeping unease at a willingness to be immersed in sport, any sport.

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My own rebuffal scarred. There was self-consciousness where it hadn’t been before. There was embarrassment and unease at the idea kicking a ball around was akin to a request to defecate in the middle of the good front room. It hastened a retreat away to safer quarters. Watching was socially acceptable, anything else was not.

There is affirmation now as the barriers are dismantled.

Tonight’s showcase Champions League meeting has all the ingredients for a classic final given the attacking credentials of both managers.

Andy Robertson’s appearance puts a kilt on the final for those of us rooting from here and there was an interesting insight into the psyche of the full-back this week.

The Scotland left-back has grown irked at people looking at his performances for Liverpool and thinking he got there through some kind of football lottery win. Rightly pointing out that he has worked his socks off to get to where he is bow for club and country, it is still difficult not to see Robertson’s story through rose tinted glasses simply because of how unusual it is in the modern era.

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If his journey to Madrid tonight for the second Champions League final of his career imparts anything it is a life lesson in resilience. Affable and unaffected by the trappings that came relatively late to his career Robertson epitomises a spirit that will win its way into the affections of many of the neutrals who will tune in tonight.

On an aside, though, it is interesting that in this final of the Champions League, that neither side has been champions of their own league for a combined total of more than 100 years; Liverpool in 1990, Spurs in 1961.

Celtic, on the back of a third successive treble, will start the arduous journey to make the qualifying stages of the tournament in less than six weeks’ time.