There’s no doubt that I inherited my love of football (soccer to American folk) from my (very) Singaporean dad.
An active football player till his late 30s, he would wake up in the middle of the night during the 1986 and 1990 World Cups, blurry-eyed but all excited about the live games being beamed into our living room. From the 1990 World Cup onwards, I slowly took over the mantle of blurry-eyed football watcher in the family and it was during those early hours of the morning that I grew to love the beautiful game.
Some Aussie certainly loved his/her football enough to stick a football icon on this street sign.
But football has never been much of a girl’s or women’s sport in Singapore and while I did a bit of “kickabout” under my HDB flat, I didn’t get to play it at school until my junior college days.
It was only when I left Singapore for Australia shortly after that I got to join a women’s team for the first time. It was an exhilarating experience. In Australia I found a society that embraced sport – not just professional sport but sport at all levels, for toddlers to geriatrics. Sport wasn’t just for men. Sport wasn’t something you had to be excellent at to play. Even if you couldn’t even kick a ball properly (me!) you could still join a team, get decked out in a full kit and have weekly training sessions with a cool football coach ala Bend It Like Beckham (OK, he was not as cute as Jonathan Rhys Meyers but he was still English and pretty hot.)
[Five-minute break to swoon over Rhys Meyers .... Ok, back to reality now.]
There’s something energising about living in a country that is so mad about watching and playing sport. I’ve played just about every sport in my years here, and watched plenty of live games in packed stadiums. On television, there’s a regular diet of sport to watch, and Aussies love their live sport so much there’s an ongoing tussle going on between free-to-air channels and cable TV providers over who gets to broadcast which tournaments.
There’s also a culture of teaching children to play as many different sports as possible when they are in primary and secondary education. All my Aussie friends learnt to play at least three or more different sports, a new one each year I think. As a result, they take to any physical activity like ducks to water. I’m always a wee bit envious though in the end I’m just happy to be alongside them playing too!
A Sydney women's football team.
In terms of professional sport, Australians take pride in the fact that many of their top athletes are also amongst the world’s best. They turn in excellent results at the Olympics and are usually one of the top two teams when it comes to rugby union and cricket. Of course, there’s plenty of debate too about whether Australia as a country is spending too much money on its professional athletes. Have they got their priorities right when there are plenty of other pressing issues to tackle, such as the welfare of indigenous Australians, and the needs of healthcare and education? But perhaps for a young nation still defining its identity, sport is an apt unifier that can give its citizens something they can be proud of.
As they love to chant in stadiums and beyond, Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi! Oi! Oi!
Duck's nuts trying her hand at outdoor climbing just outside Sydney.
Some images taken from the internet.
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