The Mighty 'Bras

By Paul Connolly

When Matildas star Sam Kerr was just a kid, when the inaugural A-League Women's season was still years away, and when a World Cup on Australian soil was a fanciful idea, a mob of mature Melbourne women threw caution, asthma inhalers and orthopaedic inserts to the wind and formed a team to play in the lowest division of t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wordsworthy
• Release date: Jul 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9780645372014

Paul Connolly

Paul Connolly is an award-winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in the Monthly, Guardian Australia, the Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald. The author of the weekly flash fiction column 'Kitchen Sink Drama' in Good Weekend magazine, he has written and edited a number of books. These include Kitchen Sink Drama, Father Figures, Sucking the Marrow Out of Life, and The World's Weirdest Sports. He lives in Brunswick, Melbourne, with his partner and their two daughters. He played football throughout his youth and the older he gets, the better he was.

Book preview

The Mighty 'Bras

Paul Connolly is an award-winning journalist and author whose work has appeared in the Monthly, Guardian Australia, the Age, and the Sydney Morning Herald. The author of the weekly flash fiction column ‘Kitchen Sink Drama’ in Good Weekend magazine, he has written and edited a number of books. These include Kitchen Sink Drama, Father Figures, Sucking the Marrow Out of Life, and The World’s Weirdest Sports. He lives in Brunswick, Melbourne, with his partner and their two daughters. He played football throughout his youth and the older he gets, the better he was.

To the women of the ’Bras, for your bravery, dedication, good humour and friendship. To Lee, for kicking me out of the house. And to Abbie and Ada. I love you both. Now empty the dishwasher.

The Mighty 'Bras

The Mighty 'Bras

Paul Connolly

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Wordsworthy

Published in 2023 by Wordsworthy Publishing

Brunswick, Victoria, 3056 Australia

www.paulconnolly.net.au

This is an edited and revised version of The Mighty Bras, first published in 2010 by Affirm Press.

Copyright © Paul Connolly 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior permission of the copyright owner.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of Australia.

The Mighty 'Bras

ISBN:  978-0-6453720-0-7 (paperback)

ISBN:  978-0-6453720-1-4 (ebook)

Cover design by Jim Pavlidis

The thing about football – the important thing about football – is that it is not just about football.

Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals

Football, she’s a cruel mistress. She’s more than a mistress. She’s a wife, she’s a mother, she’s a daughter, she’s an errant child. She can make you laugh, she can make you cry. She can bring tears to me eyes. She can bring blood  to  me  shoulders. She can...bring  the  kettle  to  the  boil. ’Cause  football  is  about  nothing,  unless it’s about something, and  what it  is about is football.

Alan Latchley [a comic creation of Peter Cook], Scunthorpe United manager

Preamble

The year 2003 was a typically eventful one in football. AC Milan beat Juventus in the Champions League final, Manchester United won the English Premier League for the eighth time in 11 seasons, David Beckham signed with Real Madrid, and a  mob  of  mature  Melbourne  women  threw caution, asthma inhalers and orthopaedic inserts to the wind and formed a team to play in the lowest division of the metropolitan league.

That the world’s media was all over the first three events but overlooked the birth of the Brunswick Zebras women’s team, let alone my decision to coach them, remains – to those involved at least – an enduring mystery. It certainly felt newsworthy to us. Before our opening match in April that year, when ‘my’ world-weary football debutants sat within a cold concrete and brick dressing shed feeling as incongruous in their boots and playing strips as they would have done in giant chicken suits, we couldn’t hear ourselves think, such was the drumming of our hearts. A remarkable journey was being commenced, of that we had no doubt.

But who in that dressing shed would have guessed that this journey would turn out to be so long-lasting? Certainly not me. I’d imagined it as a one-season jaunt; a brief foray into the world of weekend sporting amateurism before we all returned to our normal lives. For me, and an enduring core of players – some of whom were well into their 50s by the end – it lasted 11 years.

Why? Well, for one, they fell in love with the game. And from the players’ perspective it was a love all the more intense for its late blossoming and the knowledge that injury, pregnancy, or perhaps even osteoporosis, could end it in a second. Underlying this was the pure pleasure that came from kicking a ball around a field with your mates and forgetting your worries, however momentarily. It’s a pleasure I’ve been familiar with for as long as I can remember, and I experienced a proselytiser’s joy in helping them see the light.

There was also comfort in knowing, as a matter of team policy, in fact, that results were not the only measure of success. As such, a Zebra, or ’Bra for short, could be reasonably assured that their team-mates would admire their courage for trying, rather than harangue or mock them for the kind of blunder that gets players shot in some countries. Not only, I suspect, because they were especially empathetic people, but because they knew the next howling mistake was just as likely to be theirs.

Ultimately, however, we stayed together out of an abiding respect and affection for each other; respect and affection forged through highs and lows, wins and losses. Well, mostly losses if truth be told, but these are more character building, the cliché goes, and who were we to argue?

So, while it’s easy enough to speculate on why we stuck together for so long, it’s perhaps more difficult to say just what prompted a bunch of women, most of whom were aged in their thirties and forties, to begin their football careers at a time in life when most men have long since retired and cloaked themselves in nostalgia and bullshit.

And I’ve constantly had to remind myself that, apart from a few exceptions, these women, like many other women of their generations, grew up without having had the same physical and emotional relationship to sport enjoyed by many of their male counterparts. So what it clearly wasn’t was any attempt to reacquaint themselves with a sporting pedigree or a vain attempt to recapture the glory days – a common enough reason a man joins a sporting team in his thirties before he remembers, as his lungs begin burning and his knees begin clicking like a train conductor’s ticket punch, why he retired in the first place.

Not only had nobody in the original team played competition football before, the majority of the squad (which included working mothers, social workers, sexual assault counsellors, a graphic artist, a Chinese medicine practitioner, an engineer, and a medical student) had never played organised sport of any persuasion.

As such, you wouldn’t have described many of them as athletic. I certainly didn’t when I first saw a bunch of them running about a beautiful elm-draped park in Melbourne’s inner north. A broader, more inventive range of running styles I’d never seen. From one who ran hesitantly, almost apologetically, as if streaking through St Peter’s Basilica during an Easter service yet somehow hoping to pass unnoticed. To another who resembled someone trying to run in a too-tight kimono.

These weren’t, with all due respect, the dexterous sylphs of Bend It Like Beckham.

Yet in the summer of 2002–2003 – when Matildas star Sam Kerr was just a kid, when the inaugural season of the W-League (now known as A-League Women) was still six years away – two groups of women, independent of each other, were having kickabouts in the same vicinity on weekends. The first group, to generalise wildly for a moment, were inner-city bohemians in their early thirties with an aversion to uranium mines, George Bush (both of them), deforestation (including that of their own body hair), and blokes. Romantically speaking, that is.

The second group included women in their forties; women who, some time earlier, had enjoyed coastal holidays together. Invigorated by the salty air, they’d participated in games of beach football with their respective children and husbands and found it so exhilarating that they decided to meet regularly at the park – inviting friends to join them – on their return to the city.

As with the first bunch, they’d drawn some inspiration from the 2002 (men’s) World Cup in Japan and South Korea. But they’d also found it from their own children, as four of them had kids playing football with a nearby junior football club, the community-spirited Brunswick Zebras.

It may well have embarrassed these kids to see their mums pulling on shorts and brazenly exposing their athletic awkwardness in public, but that made it all the more impressive. A quiet beach was one thing, a public park in their very own neighbourhood was something else entirely. Still, if you can endure the critique of your own children, as they did, what’s left to lose?

Ultimately, as the history books will never show, these two groups found each other, I dare say with the kind of wonder primitive tribes felt when they discovered they were not alone in the jungle. After a couple of nervous yet ultimately joyful matches against each other on a full-sized pitch, a decision was made to form a single team – with me as coach – under the Zebras banner. Though the Zebras had a rich history in men’s football (the pinnacle of which was a 1985 National Soccer League championship won as Brunswick Juventus), we were the first open-age women’s team to represent the club since it formed in 1948. Although there’s still a long way to go until girls and women receive the same sporting opportunities as their male counterparts, today there are three open-age women’s teams at the Zebras, emblematic of how much has changed for the better for women in sport since this book was first published in 2010.

Whatever the individual motivations of the players who made up this team since 2003, the fact is that the venture worked, as I hope will be evident in the following pages: a kind of diary of our 2009 season, and a snapshot of the ones that came before it. A group of women who never in their wildest dreams would have imagined playing competitive football on Sunday afternoons in winter found themselves doing just that. Their lives, and the leagues they played in, were richer for it.

My reward, meantime, was the pleasure of their company and the privilege of accompanying and sometimes guiding them through the kinds of moments, both good and bad, they now look back on with pride and nostalgia: the muddy training sessions, the road trips to hitherto unexplored suburbia, the dressing room banter, the shock of mid-winter kickoffs, the nervous first glance at the opposition, the shrill cry of a whistle, the first dry-mouthed gasp for breath, the wet crack of an ankle buckling unexpectedly, the exhilaration of a sweeping move, the abject, head-hanging frustration of a goal conceded, and the sound of a sweetly struck ball hitting the back of the net.

Over the years, many of the Mighty ’Bras heard that sound. Of course, for far too many of them, it was their own net. But in the greater scheme of things, it hardly mattered.

Summer School

Amateur football teams in this part of the world tend to begin pre-season training in February, figuring it’ll take at least a couple of months of late-summer toil to get back into shape after months on the couch watching cricket and picking lint out of deepening belly buttons.

The ’Bras like to make their move much earlier, in November or December, and not only because they fear any further break from exercise will see them slip into the early stages of rigor mortis. With so many of them having come to the game so late in life, they’re keen to cram in as much football as possible. Thus pre pre-season training held on Sunday afternoons is a kind of summer school everyone is happy to attend – especially since comparatively onerous training drills are replaced by casual kickabouts, punctuated though they may be by an incredible number of drinks breaks.

(The ’Bras, as I discovered, are not ones to get dehydrated and they look to hit the bottle at the first bead of sweat. This was particularly so in the early days when some players were so unfamiliar with exercise they’d become confused and concerned any time their heart rate rose more than it would after a weak café latte.)

These days, when pre pre-season training isn’t at Sumner Park, our home ground in East Brunswick, it’s usually over the Merri Creek on a vast paddock at the rear of Northcote High School. It’s a little bumpy and a tad sandy in places but it provides a good deal of space and a small, grassy, tree-fringed bank offering pools of shade in which to flop.

Punctuality is not a strong point among the ’Bras; they wander in when the muse takes them (or, for some, when the previous night’s hangover has sufficiently abated). As it happens, the first to arrive at our first pre pre-season session of 2009 is Spike, a lovable though deranged border collie, the only dog I’ve ever seen happy to exercise itself. Like my Lab/Kelpie cross, Murray, he often comes to both training and games. But unlike Murray he runs many aimless kilometres, and has to be shepherded off the pitch constantly. Consequently, ‘Spike! Off!’ is heard more often at training than ‘whoops!’ or ‘sorry’, which is saying something.

Like a swallow heralds a northern hemisphere spring, Spike’s arrival announces the imminent appearance of his equally indefatigable caretaker, Sue. One of the original ’Bras, Sue, 48, has the verve and energy of a woman half her age. An artistic director of a Melbourne theatre company that seeks to engage children in play through its use of puppets and other interactive props, Sue’s mere presence makes my job of motivating the players that much easier because you can’t help being swept up in her slipstream – although with all her theatrical manoeuvring it can be difficult to follow. I wouldn’t go quite so far as to say Sue is the glue that keeps the team together, but when she had to sit out the 2007 season after rupturing knee ligaments, we missed her almost as much as INXS miss Michael Hutchence. Anyone who has seen the band perform without him will know what I mean.

‘Hey Coach!’ she says on her arrival, ‘It’s so good to be here. Arghh! What a day! I’ve been waiting for this like you wouldn’t believe. Woo-hoo!’

You wouldn’t think that spending your days with your hand up a puppet’s bum would be particularly draining, but clearly it can be – particularly if your company is trying to stay in business. So, what with budgets to balance, grants to sweat on, funds to raise, sets to build, performances to write, seats to fill, and so on and so forth, Sue often arrives at training stressed and pent up. Lightning in a bottle, if you will. This partly explains why, at training, she gambols about as joyfully as a spring lamb. It’s a pleasure to watch, and we all find it infectious. And it’s why training sessions with Sue are much more fun and productive than sessions without her.

Her greeting delivered, Sue tosses down her bag (containing boots that, like Spike, are usually in dire need of a wash) and flips her ropey body into a handstand, as if intending to upend the day’s burdens onto the ground.

Optimism is the overriding feeling at pre pre-season training. And why not? Last season is old news and the new season is a clean slate. We haven’t lost a game yet and anything seems possible. As a result, turnouts are usually respectable. As well as a spattering of curious newcomers and invitees who inevitably wander in for a look – and who may or may not decide to stay on and join the team – the old guard, like Sue, Deb, Marian, Liz, Jenna and Rosie, who range