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Girls with Balls
Patricia Borg is humble for a captain. Perhaps too tolerant. Although she's one of the best footballers, founder and captain of Hamrun Spartans Ladies Team, she never barks at her colleagues when they miss the ball; unlike many of her male counterparts. Instead she focuses on the ball, weaving through her opponents like a pro skier zigzagging through flags in the slalom runs.
"If you shout at the players during the game you'll distract them further," says Borg, the 26-year-old Hamrun captain and midfielder. "You have to give new players a chance to build their confidence. During play my job is to keep the team united, concentrated and calm. Then afterwards we talk about how we could do better."
A church bell clanks 10.30 am and the game kicks off between Hamrun and Gozo. With undiluted determination the players rush for the ball, and the spectators, half of them middle-aged men, holler and whistle. Pity there are only about 100 of them. Most people still consider women's football a novelty event, the kind you would put up for charity like shaving your hair off or spending a day rolling in a wheelchair. Watching how small most of the players are, the game seems about to turn into one of those school-playground games where 14-year-olds chase the ball up and down the ground and kick it around aimlessly.
That's the first impression, but not the lasting one.
Half a minute into the game the ball is kicked towards the Hamrun side and a blonde with saw-dust freckles sprinkled on her face steps towards it. She jumps above her opponents and with a thud heads the ball to the other side. I flinch, expecting the impact of the ball to throw her on her back. Instead she lands on her feet and sprints forward for the attack. Acclaimed Player of the Week twice, Hamrun are lucky to have her, Eve York, defend their side. At 18 York is already a fearless player. Even tearing her ankle ligaments failed to ground her: she rests her foot throughout the week but continues to play in the league every weekend. She concedes: "Without giving my leg a proper rest I risk getting hurt each time I play."
It seems that few women footballers are resting these days. Women's football is growing fast. With 20 million players worldwide, FIFA (the ruling body of world football) says it is now the most popular team game for women. Out of 191 associations affiliated with FIFA about 100 organise women's competitions, and many of them played in the first World Cup played in China in 1991. Here the Malta Football Association (MFA) has 200 women registered as players, and organised the first women's league this year after it was sponsored by the Fitlab Leisure Centre. Nine 7-a-side teams are competing. Hamrun are leading the league [at the time of writing]; out of 11 games they won 9, drew one and lost another. The team has come a long way since Patricia Borg founded it about 4 years ago. It started when she placed an advert in The Times asking interested women footballers and a coach to contact her to set up a team. No one replied. But she persisted and on the third advert enough women and a coach contacted her to round off a team. Now working as a shop attendant and married Borg trains at every free hour she finds.
Ranging from students to married women to career women, most of the women players in both the Hamrun side and the other teams are aged between 15 and 25. All of them have to fit football around the demands of school or work or married life. Roberta Cutajar, 15, attends school. The goalkeeper Karen De Gabrielle, 26, works as a secretary. While 25-year-old Maxine Massa, who plays with Hibernians, is a consultant at Management Systems Unit (MSU). Many of the players started kicking a ball when they were toddlers and, since then, their passion for football never dimmed. It grew with them. Maxine Massa's story is typical: "I don't know how to explain this but football is in me. I come from a family of footballers; my grandfather used to play and so do my cousins. I remember playing when I was little, and then I played at Sixth Form and University."
Felix Camilleri, Hamrun Spartans Ladies' coach, joined the team when he saw Borg's ad. At the time he coached teenage boys, but he decided to contact Borg and see her just-formed team playing. Impressed by their performance, he gave in to the team's pleas to coach them. "The girls have a higher spirit for the game than the boys," he observes. "And the team spirit is also alive - we go out together as a team. Though you have to be softer with girls. If I had to tell off a male player for doing something wrong he shrugs off my comments, but women are more sensitive, they keep it in them. This does not affect their performance of course, you just have to be softer with them."
That doesn't mean they're soft during a game. They butt in and fight for the ball with sliding tackles and everything. Karen De Gabrielle broke her fingers twice and her hand another time throughout the league yet she still guards the goal-posts like a bulldog guarding his kennel. "Karen is fearless," Camilleri points out. "If an opponent is in front of the goalposts about to shoot, Karen wouldn't think twice about jumping at her feet to snatch the ball."
Dr. Herbert Messina Ferrante, vice-president of the MFA in charge of the women's league, says: "I am quite happy with their physical ability. Football is the most rough game and the women can be as nasty as men. Also technically the women who have played for a long time are quite good but not as good as men."
The thing is men have a head start by over a century, and up to this day, women lack the opportunities that men have. We still consider football a male-only game, and while parents encourage their sons to play they laugh off their daughters' interest in football, if it ever surfaces.
"We are the victims of a mentality that football is a men's game," Patricia Borg says. "Some people look at me as if I'm crazy and say, 'What are you doing playing football?' Sometimes I join a men's team for an uncompetitive game and they try to dribble around me to make fun of me. Then they realise I can play and accept me as one of them."
The women say they avoid making an issue out of comparisons with men. Women's football is a game in its own right: they set their own standards, develop in their own pace and they want to get on with playing rather than stop and copy what men do. Of course, in many ways, the game, structure and rules and attitude are the same as in the men's game. "A team is like managing anything else: it's important to communicate and adapt a strategy for the game," points out Maxine Massa, whose words seem inspired by her management degree. "And you have to be a bit aggressive when fighting for the ball. I try to raise my team's morale during games."
Back to the clash between Gozo and Hamrun, Gozo are winning 3 - 1 fifteen minutes from end. The Hamrun players are grim, pressing forward and bombarding Gozo's goal-posts to make a come-back. Five minutes from end one of Hamrun's defenders nudges the ball with her elbow to stop it going past her. Gozo get a penalty which they net. When the referee whistles off the game the Gozo team become ecstatic: a scream erupts as they embrace each other, they start chanting and throwing water bottles in the air. The spectators remain silent, however, presumably because they're Hamrun supporters.
Many of the girls playing today are looking forward to the day when the MFA set up a national women's team. A selection of players have already played against Sweden earlier this year, losing 2 - 0. Eve York, the Hamrun defender, talks with increasing gusto about such a mild loss, considering the Malta team lacked proper preparation. Now she wants to make it into the national team. She still remembers the day when she joined a league at school with the boy's team and the referee called her over and said, 'I have never seen a girl play football before and I'm not letting you play.' York says: "I wouldn't be myself without playing football. I watch all the games on TV and want to be part of the national team."
© Victor Paul Borg
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