Who Wants it?: Playing Against Boys/Playing With Girls

Sometimes I think I play with women, and I play against men.

Let me explain: I play in a weekly scrimmage in which I'm the only woman on the field. Last week I had fairly typical night for a female player in an all-male setting. That sort of game looks like this: My teammate has the ball, and there is plenty of space between us. I call for the ball. I'm open, probably because I am not being marked. This may be because I'm a girl. I would like to be seen as enough of a threat to be marked, but I am not above exploiting my invisibility to defenders. So I call for the ball again.

He now has two defenders on him. He looks around for someone to pass it to. I am still unmarked. I perhaps try to get in a better position to receive a pass, and call for the ball again. It is as if I am not only invisible, I am apparently mute as well. I call for the ball in Spanish, and in maybe even in French. I call for it again. He is still holding onto the ball and then he decides to, say, pass it back or attempt to cross it into a cluster of players.

This happens two, three, four times in a row. By which point I am fully demoralized. If at this point in the game the ball is passed to me, I am not expecting it. I either do a bad job controlling it, or get rid of it too quickly. I stop wanting the ball, so I am not fighting for it, and I drift out of the game entirely.

This is where I usually ask to play defense - which is a funny position for a girl my size in a guy's game. But by this point I am mad - at myself as much as my teammates.

Most of the game has been spent trying to make myself visible, to get in the game, and then digging myself out of the psychic hole that swallows you up as you wonder "Is it because I am a girl?" or "Am I that bad?"

So, once I am on the back line I play with the particular focus bestowed by rage. I think very cynically: "He's going to bring it up on the right, because I am here and he thinks he can get around me." And he probably can, since he's 15 years younger than me and has been playing a lot longer. But I can push him wide, and steer him to the next defender - containing him. That almost always works. Often, guys will call for the ball even when I am marking them. I love this. The more they do that, the more likely I am intercept the pass or force the turn-over. And when my foot is on the ball, they have nobody to blame but their own limited imagination.

I love the very particular frustration that those guys display when I get the ball away from them. I think I enjoy defending against guys for this reason. If I've spent the first half of the game being ignored, I play the second half like a castrating bitch. (This is more or less how I experience certain aspects of my professional life as well!)

When I play soccer with women, this stuff just doesn't happen. You either want the ball or you don't. A player who repeatedly doesn't pass the ball to an unmarked teammate who is calling loudly for the ball will catch shit from the entire team. And if I'm not getting the ball from a teammate, I just think she's an ass. I don't think she's sexist.

I became a much better player by playing with women. I got the ball a lot more often, and was expected to do more with it. (There is nothing quite so awful as that thing guys will do with girl-players - where they act like it's a miracle when you complete a pass. It takes the pleasure from the compliment if you realize that your basic competency has come as a surprise!)

Without the demoralization of playing with boys handy as a rationalization for limits in my ambition, I had to ask much deeper questions of myself. If I wasn't getting the ball, it was because I wasn't calling and fighting for the ball. It wasn't because the team didn't believe in me. It was because I didn't believe in myself.

The players I most admire play with an incredible confidence. The ball seems to find them. It's like they are fueled by a cocktail of desire and belief. Taking the field with women like this is just plain liberating.

And with that, I'll raise my glass to our new President and direct your attention to the video below, made by students at my home university - UC Riverside.

Yes We Did!

Falling Down

If I ask myself how playing soccer has changed me, I'd have to say that I fall a lot more than I used to.

Coaches say "stay on your feet" before a game. They need to say this because falling is such a big part of soccer. Who says "stay on your feet" before a baseball game? Nigerian Faith Ikidi is pictured here surprising North Korea's Ri Kum Suk with a reverse kick. I have no idea if she stayed on her feet as she did so - but clearly she's not playing like that's her only aim.

Falling was not a part of my life until I started playing about five years ago. Tripping, sure. But falling? Flying through the air falling? These were bodily events to be avoided at all costs.

Falling was not a part of my life until I tried tackling Sojin.

This was at the start of my new formation as a soccer nut. I was one of those dangerous new adult players with no sense of her own physicality or how playing the game actually works. I was running full-on at Sojin, who had the ball. I had no plan, and I wasn't wearing cleats.

I don't remember what happened, but I ended up launched into the air like Superman, except of course I can't fly. I landed flat on my stomach - a very weird crash landing that knocked the breath out of me.

The experience was extremely bizarre for me. Totally mystifying. What had happened? Why did I fly through the air like that? What had I done? Was it my fault? Was it Sojin's? (I had a terrible tendency to want to blame whoever else was near me for whatever happened to me on the field.) Being a congenital theorist, I made everybody stop playing to process the experience with me. (I am amazed these folks put up with me during that first year!)

Sojin, a far more experienced athlete and certainly a better soccer player, was bemused by my confusion, and patiently explained that if you run full speed at someone - if you charge at someone like that - you are very likely to go flying. "Plus," she said very sensibly, "you need cleats." (That was the last time I played in anything but the proper shoes.)

Nearly a year later I had another memorable fall. In the intervening months I'd started playing pick-up games and had learned a lot. I'd learned to think less - or, more nearly, I'd learned to let my body do more of the thinking. This time I was tackled by a pretty big guy who meant me no harm, but physics dictated that I go ass-over-teakettle forward through the air - I'd been running, and somehow he got me from behind. I tumbled right over myself, and came up on my feet - ball still at my toes. I tried to play on, but my friends were all so stunned that they'd stopped to stare. They were rightly wondering if I was OK - as every other time I'd fallen, I'd been rattled to my physical and psychic core.

This time, however, I was relaxed when I went down, and so the fall didn't really take me down. It was, in fact, fun. I remember that fall in great detail - and a few others, too. A player nicknamed Barca slide tackled me in a training session last spring - she mistimed the tackle just a bit and clipped my feet. Everyone was mad at her, but I was thrilled that'd she'd considered me enough of a threat. Sure, I was sent a few feet in the air, but I was fine. And I'd won my team a free kick. In June, I played in a tournament staged over a rainy weekend, and the slide tackles were fast and furious - I know I took at least two hard tackles that had me kissing the grass. I found both bracing - like a splash of cold water. They were clean, fluid tackles, too - something I admire, even if they are directed at me. And I honestly think I played better that day for them.

As a defender, you often go flying because you are giving, not receiving the tackle. I am still to green to be working on anything but instinct, and so when I go flying it's out of a reflex. I don't usually know what has happened until I'm wiping the dirt off of myself. Still, I'm thrilled by the experience.

I am not yet at the level I most admire - the player who throws herself in the air to win the ball or score. My falls are reactive - and they are usually caused by something I am doing with my feet. I'm not the player who will dive to head the ball into the net - but I would very much like to be her.

I used to think that falling was synonymous with getting hurt. But I know now that that isn't exactly true. Falling awkardly, falling when you are tense - this will hurt. But play relaxed and fluid, and you'll be surprised by what your body can do. Somehow you fall, but you don't fall down.

Defensive Thoughts

Why is playing defense so satisfying? I know it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but there are more than a few of us who love the high anxiety of the back line in a tight game - who love the challenge of trying to shut down a player with more speed, more skill - who live for the peculiar victory of engineering another's defeat. (Check out Nigeria's Faith Ikidi as she tackles Sweden's Teresa Sjorgan here in the 2007 World Cup.)

I am back home in Los Angeles, and just played today with a new team - 11-a-side, under blue skies & the hot afternoon sun, on a typical LA field (bumpy, with huge swaths of packed dirt running up and down the field). The first day with a new team can be nerve wracking, but these women were really welcoming and relaxed. Our opponents struggled for reasons that weren't totally clear as they seemed OK on the ball (fitness perhaps?). Our team won handily (3-0).

I played left back and had a great game. Not perfect, but still great. I pushed up, got involved in play, made all sorts of trouble for those trying to move down the wing, and had a really dramatic 'save' which nixed a breakaway at the last minute - At a full-on run, I managed to just catch the ball with my left foot as the striker was trying to pull it to the left to make a shot. I went flying, too, bringing down the striker and our keeper as I did so - but I'd gotten nothing but ball with the foot, and everyone was OK.

From the reactions of my teammates, I guess it looked pretty good. But as a defender, you are just angry that someone got past you, and that anyone is near the goal. You don't celebrate a block like you celebrate a goal. If you are in that situation, it's because something on your end went wrong. In this case, I wasn't in the right position, I got split between two players and got totally played on a nice give and go between their forwards, and one of them broke free. And while I may have gotten my foot on the ball at the right moment, I gave up a corner.

Defense can be such a different game than attack. Your work is often negative (stopping the action), and you are also often cleaning up messes (your own, your team's). And when you fuck up, you can't just stop to wallow in shame. You have to immediately, without missing a beat, keep at it. If you don't, your mistake may put the other team ahead. In a funny way, you can't take your mistakes too seriously during the game itself.

In any case, back to my opening question: Why is this role so satisfying?

Maybe it's because a really strong back line allows for the possibility of mistakes, allows your team to be more risky in its attacking game - and isn't this what makes the game interesting? I guess I just like being trusted with this responsibility.

Beautiful Losers: From One Bird to Another

Like the Uraguyan writer Eduardo Galeano who confessed that he just plain loved a beautiful game, no matter who was playing it, I am more a fan of the game than I am a fan of any particular team. I live so close to Arsenal's stadium that I can hear the games from my living room even when the windows are closed. I admire the young Gunners - not because they play the game perfectly (obviously, they don't), but because they look like they love to play. I am, though, in my heart of hearts more partial to the Spurs. They are even more spectacular in my eyes. When they go down, it's often dramatically - after having put 4 goals in the net. Sometimes they play not just with joy, but with near total abandon.

Clearly, I love beautiful losers. Simon Barnes borrows this term from Leonard Cohen to wonder at how Arsenal fans are holding up. Tom Dunmore expanded on the theme for his site Pitch Invasion - and I thought I'd join this discussion of the affection some of us have for those who give us more than mere victory.

I love beautiful losers both on and off the pitch. The pleasure, elegance, and virtuosity of a game are paramount. There is a righteousness to the well played game - a game that unfolds between the whole team in which the skill level is so high that the team's "stars" must establish their genius with death-defying headers, with outrageous runs, or a cross so fast and so precise as to be telepathic. But more than anything, 'beautiful losers' show you their love for the game above all else.

It's one thing to talk about beautiful loser teams. This title also applies of course - and perhaps even more compellingly - to a few players. The most fabulous is probably Garrincha - Pele's countryman & misshapen teammate was never supposed to be able to run, but played perhaps the most gorgeous football in history. Garrincha never turned his genius into a "career" like Pele (who turned his name into a global brand). His last years (spent in alcoholic ignomy) were as hard as his first. That said, this end takes nothing away from the joy he gave to his fans.

I don't know what it is, but footage of Garrincha can move me to tears - they are very sentimental tears, tears of joy - a strange kind of emotional sympathy for that improbable, impossible being who seems to fall out of the sky and onto the world stage - and whose unlikeliness seems to be the very engine of their genius.

I'm more than a little tempted to link the particular nature of his legacy as a player to that of Edith Piaf - he has, I think, almost more in common with an artist like her than he does with other athletes. When Piaf (or Judy Garland or Billie Holiday) sang it was as if her entire being vibrated with some excess, some unnameable thing - it's beyond simple pleasure - and listening to them, you feel it in your bones, too. It's no accident that "Piaf" and "Garrincha" mean "little bird" and "wren". Garrincha's game was more of a song than a plan - and it seemed to lift everyone near it to another plane. But it also somehow felt like a game you could inhabit - and like the weirdest most unlikely part of yourself might be worth something.

Take Piaf's performance of "L'Accordeoniste": This is an incredible song, which in and of itself goes to the point: The story is of "une fille de joie" (prostitute) and losing oneself in the nightlife - in music - it's a tragic story of a woman dreaming of something else, dreaming of her lover and another life - dreaming dreams that will never be realized (he goes off to war and never comes back). Nevertheless, inhabiting the music she loves totally, she transports herself to another place. The music in which she once lost herself to pleasure, however, becomes a special form of torture.... The key words here (rough translation): "It goes right through her skin, from the top to the bottom. She needs to sing, it's physical: her whole being is tense, she holds her breath - she's wrapped up in the music" - "la fille de joie" is the song, the song is her - being taken over by that music is too much, and there Piaf is, signing it, channeling it all for your pleasure. It's crazy.

Every now and again an athlete does this too - uniting thought, feeling, body to make something much bigger than the sum of its parts - taking us with them in the proess. (Maradona, certainly, had this thing, I think Marta might, but it's hard to tell, since it's impossible to watch her play if you don't live in Sweden.)

Sometimes that energy spreads out to a team - it radiates out from an individual body and becomes a collective consciousness. Loving a team like this is about loving the ride. It's not that we don't care about winning - we just don't want to give up extra thing - the beauty, the sublimity - in order to win. It's just not worth it.

And with that - here is "Barcelona", sung by opera diva Montserrat Cabellé & Freddie Mercury - the most beautiful of the beautiful losers: