![]() There was a huge controversy and the championship organiser thought it would be better if I didn't play any more.' She believes 'the boys felt inferior'. ![]() ![]() 'I played in the local championship for two years, until another team said that they would withdraw from the tournament if I continued to play. And again, because she was so good she encountered more obstacles. She then dribbled around the keeper again for a better angle, and scored.Īfter playing in the streets for a few years, Marta joined a five-a-side indoor team. Last year, in a game for Umea, she picked up the ball in her own half and dribbled past six players including the goalkeeper. She developed into a creative centre-forward, perhaps the most Brazilian of all positions (her role model is Rivaldo). ![]() Marta picked up their favourite skills - dribbling and flamboyant ball control. Playing with boys did have benefits, however. 'He had heard people slag me off, and so he wanted to protect me.' Her eldest brother was opposed to her playing what was, in effect, a game for boys. There was resistance, too, within her family. 'Even now in Brazil you hear comments like that,' Marta says, with a sigh. I might have been small but I was a tough little girl. 'They would insult me, say that I had no shame. When Marta played football, many of the boys mocked her. Dois Riachos is about as remote as you can get. The more impoverished and remote the town or village in Latin America, the more entrenched and chauvinistic the attitudes. When none of them had a ball, they would make one by folding up plastic bags. She began to play football in the streets with local boys. 'If my mum had done that we would have gone without food.' 'We didn't have enough money even to buy a football,' Marta told me, speaking in Portuguese. He left her mother when Marta was just a baby, condemning the family - Marta has two elder brothers and a sister - to poverty and struggle. When it doesn't - which is most of the time - there is little work to go round. Marta was born in Dois Riachos, a town in the parched north-east of Brazil with a population of about 12,000. In two years' time, she will overtake Mia to be the best.' I think in the history of women's football only Mia Hamm has been a better player. Simoes says Marta's technique is as good as the men's. 'Whether playing dominoes, cards, or football - neither of them accepts losing.' He compares Marta to another Brazilian centre-forward - the great Romario, with whom he has also worked. Rene Simoes coached Brazil's women's team at the 2004 Olympics. Umea lost, but Marta, a striker, was outstanding, reaffirming her place as the world's best female footballer. In 2006, she was voted Fifa's Women's Player of the Year and, most recently, she played in the Uefa Cup final for Umea IK, from northern Sweden, against Arsenal Ladies. Marta Vieira da Silva is Brazil's most successful female footballer. Yet because of the cultural barriers against women playing football, the sport that most defines the nation, women's football has been conspicuously neglected. Beach volleyball pair Jackie Silva and Sandra Pires became, in 1996, the first Brazilian women to win Olympic gold. Maria Esther Bueno won Wimbledon three times, in 1959, 19. Brazil has produced other world-beating sportswomen. Hortencia was Brazil's best ever female basketball player she also posed nude in Playboy. Even when women achieve sporting success, they are expected to conform to stereotype.
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