Under the Lights and In the Dark (eBook)

Untold Stories of Women's Soccer

Gwendolyn Oxenham (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2017 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Icon Books Ltd (Verlag)
978-1-78578-154-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Under the Lights and in the Dark: Untold Stories of Women's Soccer takes an unprecedented look inside the lives of professional football players around the world - from precarious positions in underfunded teams and leagues, to sold-out stadiums and bright lights. Award-winning filmmaker and journalist Gwendolyn Oxenham tells the stories of the phenoms, underdogs, and nobodies - players willing to follow the game wherever it takes them.  Under the Lights and in the Dark takes us inside the world of women's soccer, following players across the globe, from Portland Thorns star Allie Long, who trains in an underground men's league in New York City; to English national Fara Williams, who hid her homelessness from her teammates while playing for the English national team. Oxenham takes us to Voronezh, Russia, where players battle more than just snowy pitches in pursuing their dream of playing pro, and to a refugee camp in Denmark, where Nadia Nadim, now a Danish international star, honed her skills after her family fled from the Taliban. Whether you're a newcomer to the sport or a die-hard fan, this is an inspiring book about stars' beginnings and adventures, struggles and hardship, and, above all, the time-honored romance of the game.

Gwendolyn Oxenham is the author of Finding the Game: Three Years, Twenty-five Countries and the Search for Pickup Soccer (St Martin's Press) and the director of Pelada, an award-winning documentary. She has written for The Atlantic, Sports Illustrated, and Slate, and has an MFA in creative writing. A Duke University soccer alum who played for Santos FC in Brazil, she currently lives in Dana Point, California. 

Textauszug

La Gringa

FEBRUARY 2016, AT 8.15 on a Friday night in a rented high school gym in Queens, New York, two teams of Latino men get ready to play futsal – a fast-paced, small-sided version of soccer. The fans lean against the wall, empanadas in hand, eyes on the court, eyes on the white girl – la gringa – who warms up alongside the men.

Though Allie Long gives off no signs of being anything but at ease, as a spectator, you can’t help be nervous for her – just by nature of sheer contrast: the men warming up are burly and brutish, all hairy legs and tattooed forearms. Some have their hands tucked beneath the waistbands of their shorts, like at any second they will reach down and jostle their balls. Their stretches are choppy and brusque, aggressive bursts of toe touching. And though the game has not yet started, they already smell like sweat.

Then there’s Long: the gym lights glint off her blonde ponytail. She arrives at the court wearing a zip-up, cowl-neck hoodie. A forest green infinity scarf is slung over the top, looking effortlessly glamorous. She has on black Lycra leggings and Nike sneakers with neon yellow mesh. She strips off several top layers until she is down to a t-shirt, an oversized men’s v-neck that somehow makes her seem all the more feminine.

When the referee catches sight of her, he does a double-take, head whipping back in her direction. Incredulous, he says, “Are you going to play?” When she nods, he pushes for further clarification: “With them?” he asks, gesturing to the men surrounding him. Again, Long nods.

In high school gyms across Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan, immigrant men from all over the world play for money in cutthroat futsal leagues, games often stretching until three in the morning. In most of those gyms, Long is a familiar face, having played in these leagues for the past four years. But P.S. 130 is one of the few gyms and leagues she has not yet played in. Her usual Friday night team is currently in Vegas, playing for a $36,000 pot (which they will win). Long, in training, always in training, needed a game, and her friend Diego invited her to play with his team of Argentines.

Long briefly exits the gym, presumably to change out of her leggings. The group of Ecuadorians she’ll be playing against stand in a huddle and talk about her in Spanish, every sentence peppered with gringa or rubia (“blonde girl”).

When Long returns, she is wearing Paris Saint-Germain soccer shorts. While it’s common practice for players to don the shorts of the professional team they support, often bought in gift shops or ordered on the internet, Allie’s shorts are actual Paris Saint-Germain shorts. In 2014, she was the starting center midfielder for the women’s side.

Long hurriedly pulls on crew socks, tiny shinguards, and turf shoes. She tugs her team’s Argentine jersey over the top of her t-shirt. She then removes the t-shirt, slipping it out of the head hole – a deft move she’s clearly done thousands of times.

Allie doesn’t start, instead stretching along the sideline as the game begins. The game falls into its rhythm: it is fast-paced and blunt, heavy bodies lurching on the basketball court, nearly clumsy-looking, were it not for the grace with which they ping the ball: it’s almost all one-touch, zipping from one player to the next, each player attuned to the others.

Five minutes into the game, the spectators are chanting, “Cambio Rubia, Cambio Rubia” – sub in the blonde girl, sub in the blonde girl.

Their wish is granted: Allie subs in, woven into the fabric of the game – bodies moving in, moving away, constantly in flux. She shows no signs of being intimidated – she doesn’t let herself hide, doesn’t drift to the side or fade into the background. She’s constantly pushing to make herself available. Within ten minutes, she scores two goals and sets up three others.

The audience response isn’t gaudy – they don’t scream and laugh, although that does frequently happen. It is only a collective intake of breath, small sounds of appreciation and approval – the same noise they make when any other player does something beautiful.

When the whistle blows, Long gathers her stuff and heads out, holding her bag in one hand, a napkin-wrapped empanada in the other. She climbs into a silver Lexus – off to her next game.

ALLIE LONG IS a professional soccer player for the Portland Thorns. She is a contender for the United States national team. Four times, she had worn the United States national team jersey and represented her country – but she had never done it when it mattered; she had never played in the World Cup or the Olympics or in any international tournament with stakes. That is what she wants more than anything else – and to do that, to get there, she plays in underground men’s leagues across New York, sometimes playing four or five games a night during the offseason. “It is hands down the best training I get,” says Long as she starts her car and inches out of her curbside parking spot. “Anybody can train – but these games are different – I wanted to do something I knew no one else was doing.”

Nothing about these games is light-hearted. There’s both prize money and pride on the line. Teams are run by community kingpins who own restaurants or construction companies or some other undisclosed operation. Each team owner wants to have the best team in the neighborhood – so they’re willing to shell out cash for the best players. In no way is Long the only one to have played pro; many of the men have played in different tiers of professional leagues all around the world. Team managers put in calls to the ringers: “I’ll give you $100 to play for my team on Thursday night.” By moving from game to game, a good player can make up to $800 a night – which is more than they make in their day jobs as construction workers and dishwashers. (The fans, too, stand to make money – come play-off time, there is rampant betting – money passed from hand to hand in the crowds that surround the court.) In the 2015 National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), for the six-month season, the starting salary was $6,842. An NYC men’s league ringer can make more than that in two weeks.

Long, as a star of the NWSL, makes more toward the top of the salary range – $37,800. For her, the money is not the prime draw of the NY leagues – it’s the intensity level the money brings with it. “I love the pressure. I love that I have to perform,” says Long.

In France, the league was very unbalanced – two or three teams significantly better than the rest – and her Paris side would win games by six goals. Long sometimes wouldn’t break a sweat. That doesn’t happen here. Here, when it’s four against four, plus keepers, you can’t get lost. Every touch counts. You lose the ball or get stripped or play the ball poorly, and someone’s scoring against your team, and there’s no question whose fault it is. When you’re the girl – when the whole gym is looking at you to see whether you stack up, you can’t let that happen. And you know – always you know – what they’ll say if your team loses: that it’s because of the girl.

REWIND TO SUMMER 2008. Allie Long was a University of North Carolina soccer player. To train for her senior season, her long-time coach Adrian Gaitan invited her to train with his men’s semi-pro team. Her first day out, they played small-sided games. Allie’s team lost three games in a row. As her team stood in line, one guy said, “Why the hell do we keep losing?” A guy from the other team – the winning team – jogged by and called out, “It’s because you’ve got the girl on your team.”

Allie stood there, pissed, mind-blowingly pissed – it was not because of her. She stared at the back of the kid’s buzzed head, thinking, That mother-fer. I hate that kid. I really hate that kid. He turned back toward her and grinned. He winked, like, I don’t mean that. I’m just saying that to get you worked up. But the wink didn’t make it better. Does he think this is a joke? Long thought. This is not a fucking joke.

The guy taunting her was Jose Batista, known to most as Bati. Half-Colombian, half-Brazilian, he’s always joking, always smiling. He’s funny, and with every practice Allie became more aware of that. She’d tell herself, “Don’t laugh at him. You hate him.” But he broke her down, joke by joke, play by play. He wasn’t the machismo-brimming asshole she thought he was, even if she still got angry when thinking about that first joke. He was the first one to tease – to say the one thing he knew would piss her off the most – but he was also the first to recognize her contributions. And beyond a smile that was impossible not to notice, he was so smooth on the ball, graceful and calm. He could break down a defense with one pass, and he was the type who had the audacity to chip a penalty kick up the middle no matter how much was at stake. It was undeniably attractive.

They gravitated toward one another: one night Bati and his friend Gustavo, “Goo,” came out to Long Island to see her – “The Jungle” they called it,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.7.2017
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Natur / Technik ► Fahrzeuge / Flugzeuge / Schiffe ► Fahrrad
• Themenwelt: Sport ► Ballsport ► Fußball
• Schlagworte: Allie Long • Bend it like Beckham • court case • Euros 2017 • Fara Williams • futebol feminino • Molly Levinson • Nadia Nadim • Under the light and in the dark • United States women's football team • ussf • US Soccer Federation • women's football • women's soccer • Women's Super League • World Cup 2018 • WSL
• ISBN-10: 1-78578-154-5 / 1785781545
• ISBN-13: 978-1-78578-154-4 / 9781785781544