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Thank God, Friday’s got big football goals |
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Friday, 13 October 2006 |
THERE WAS nothing out of the ordinary at the Ateneo football field as dusk scattered itself across Sunday’s late afternoon skies like a glob of black ink dropped into a glass of water.
The pitch, watered by a steady midday drizzle just hours before, was bathed in the scent of mud and crushed grass as Japanese students played out the final moments of a pickup football game. A girl in casual white shorts and a red V-neck spaghetti-strap top cloaked in a black jacket may have seemed completely out of place in the entire scene.
But only for a while.
When Andrea “Friday” Mamaclang kicked off her sandals and deftly juggled a soccer ball with her feet, it was clear she belonged here. And when she sent the ball sailing to the back corner of a partially ripped net, everybody knew this was her playground. Including the students, everybody stopped to watch her perform and applauded noisily afterwards.
“I really love soccer. I’ve loved it since I was a kid,” said Friday.
“She’s a soccer freak,” said Honey Cruz, a close friend of the 29-year-old former national player.
“When I was young, I always felt different because I couldn’t relate to girls,” said Friday. “So I always played with the boys.”
This year, though, she’s going to enjoy playing with the girls. The big girls.
Friday is set to become the first female Filipino to play in the women’s English Premier League. And she won’t just dress up for Brighton and Hove, the team that opened the big-league door for her.
Brighton and Hove manager Nici Rice is making her the Seagulls’ starting center-midfielder.
“I’m actually going to be an attacking type of midfielder,” beamed Friday. For an idea as to how sensitive the position is, think Real Madrid’s David Beckham, Manchester United’s Ryan Giggs and the French national team’s Zinedine Zidane.
And in this stint, which Friday considers to be her last run at soccer before she calls it quits, scoring goals won’t mean just firing shots into open nets. A goal for her is something with a bigger sense of purpose.
“[Brighton and Hove] can’t pay me so we’ve come up with this kind of x-deal where they’ll train me to develop soccer here,” revealed Friday. So even if she isn’t wearing the colors of the national squad, she’ll be playing for the country on an even bigger stage.
“I’ll be getting a lot of ties with the English [Football Association],” she said. “Plus, my manager is a football development officer for the English FA. They’ll hook us up with qualified coaches who can conduct tryouts with no biases [like] what school you came from and stuff like that.”
To understand why Friday would fit such a huge cause into her life, one only needs to look at her background and grasp the fact that frustration often drives her to excel.
As a perky five-year-old, the former University of the Philippines star would often be left pouting at the sidelines while watching dad Miguel, a standout for the E. Razon Football Squad before, play with her brother on the field. She’d sulk and kick soccer balls into walls and juggle them a lot until she noticed she could do it better than most boys.
As a high schooler at Colegio de San Agustin, she’d get frustrated at the pace of girls’ football that she’d play with the boys -- wearing skirt and leather shoes.
Now, she takes a look at the state of football and knows she has to do something about it. Even quadrennial football fans, whose passion for the game is stoked only during World Cup years, can easily see that the country’s football program has given new meaning to the word rock-bottom.
What more the game MVP of the Philippines’ first win in the Asian level, a 5-0 drubbing of Nepal during the 1999 Asian Women’s Football Championship where Friday scored the first two goals?
“I just want to give our boys and girls a chance,” said Friday. “Hopefully, if I do good [in the English Premier League], I will open doors for the country. Hopefully, it will be easy for us to play anywhere.”
Even as the early evening sucked the last light out of the sky, there was a hint of a glow on Friday’s face as she picked up her sandals, trudged barefooted across the soggy field and kicked a ball along the way.
One day, she hopes, this won’t be a playground of her own, but of other perky little girls who dream of running around manicured pitches even while wearing skirts and leather shoes.
Courtesy of The Philippine Daily Inquirer
By Francis Ochoa
Inquirer
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