One of the joys of sport is watching your team gain confidence. Such gains can be slow and cumulative, taking years, but sometimes they’re part of a hot streak, needing a string of only four or five matches.
In football, the rising barometer of confidence can happen over a whirlwind 90 minutes. A patchy first half is redeemed by a shot that hits the post, or a narrow miss. Added to a stern halftime pep talk, confidence leaps into the second-half frame.
So it was last week with the South African women’s football team, Banyana Banyana, in their last Group G World Cup game against Italy in Wellington, New Zealand
After going 1-0 down to an early Italian penalty, Banyana equalised; then they took the lead through a deft Hildah Magaia left-footed goal. Italy’s equaliser after a corner to make it 2-2 might have bothered Banyana and their long-suffering coach, Desiree Ellis, but here was a team on the move. It didn’t dent their confidence surge.
Such confidence allowed Magaia a late charge into the Italy area before her perfect pass was rolled into Thembi Kgatlana’s path. The rest, as they say, is history, as Kgatlana fired home from close range in extra time.
In beating Italy 3-2, Banyana secured three points to add to the point they gained from their 2-2 draw against Argentina earlier in the tournament. It was enough to catapult them into the knockout round of 16 with group leaders, Sweden, against whom South Africa lost 2-1 in the pouring rain in their opening game.
Such an institution have Banyana become that is difficult to imagine they were once, very briefly, called Bafazi Bafazi (the Wives). All this is of little import now, because Banyana is officially a household name. And adept at making the nation proud.
Just reaching the round of 16, the first time any South African football team — men or women — has progressed to the knockout stages of a World Cup, is a big achievement
Banyana’s opponents in Sydney last Sunday, the Netherlands, proved too tough a proposition and they lost 2-0. But no-one would have dared dream before the World Cup that the fairytale would last that long. Is it fair to call it a fairytale, which conjures up images of castles in the sky and distant princesses? Maybe not. Reaching the last 16 was a feet-on-the-ground achievement, requiring toil, teamwork and self-belief. The women’s game in this country will hopefully now go from strength to strength.
In playing the Netherlands it was not difficult to miss the symmetry because some of the foundations for Banyana were laid by Ellis’s predecessor, Vera Pauw, who is Dutch. Pauw was a player with pedigree, having spent two years in the late 1980s with Italian Serie A club Modena — the first Dutch woman player to play professionally elsewhere in Europe — and also representing her country 89 times.
In 2014, in an act so far-reaching you have to ask yourself if it happened at all, the South African Football Association (Safa) hired Pauw as national women’s coach. Soon after starting her new job, Pauw heard Ellis commentating on TV. She was impressed and seconded Ellis to the national set-up as her assistant. Pauw called Ellis her “encyclopaedia”.
The positive vibes were mutual. Ellis has said that she would have loved to have played international football under Pauw as coach, because it would have made her a better player. As it was, the two had to be content orchestrating matters from the side of the pitch.
As coach and assistant coach, they brought best practice to Banyana. A defender herself, Pauw was excellent at defensive organisation from set pieces and corners. The team made incremental gains. For the first time they qualified for an Olympics — at Rio in 2016.
The results in Rio were not what Banyana wanted, and Pauw left soon afterwards, but the team was growing up. Their star players were being recognised abroad. Ellis took over the running of the side in a caretaker capacity.
Against the Italians Banyana played some neat, crafty football, but they also defended naively
When Ellis took over from Pauw seven years ago she was no spring chicken. Ellis was born prematurely in 1963. She was so tiny she fitted into a shoebox and spent much of her first few months in an incubator. Her parents, Ernest (a typewriter technician) and Natalie (a seamstress and dressmaker) sometimes doubted she would see her first birthday.
They needn’t have worried. Ellis was a fighter. When at Dryden Street Primary School in Salt River, she, her brother and her three sisters all played street soccer, Ellis excelled.
She was also a fighter with a social conscience. “After school we went to Auntie Susan’s house, because both our parents worked,” says Ellis. “I didn’t like the idea of people going hungry, so sometimes I would raid auntie’s pantry and throw packets of rice and tins of food over her wall, so they could be picked up by passers-by.”
Being born in 1963 meant that Ellis didn’t play international football until she was 30, her best years long past. She played with honour intermittently over 10 or so years, the period coinciding with Banyana playing only three times a year.
These were the early days, when the only people who took women’s football seriously in this country were the women who played it. Early team photographs show Banyana players wearing outsized shirts and baggy shorts — cast-offs from the men’s national teams. Everything was a struggle, from recognition to perks and time off.
Before her last match for the national side against Zimbabwe in Harare in 2002, Ellis and her teammates had to change into their kit in a car park. It was a far cry from the painted nails, Instagram posts and cult of celebrity that greet international women’s footballers now.
After Pauw’s departure, Ellis was given the job full-time. She could have another go at what she hadn’t managed to achieve in the prehistory of the women’s game in this country.
Under her, Banyana qualified for their first World Cup, in France four years ago. They scored only one goal and lost all three matches, but it was a start. Their eyes were opened.
Not long afterwards Covid hit and Ellis’s best-laid plans had to be laid to rest. The pandemic meant rejigging the international football calendar and suddenly the 2022 Women’s Africa Cup of Nations in Morocco qualified as entry to this year’s World Cup in Australasia.
Banyana opened the tournament with a game against Nigeria, so often over the course of Ellis’s playing and coaching career their bête noire. Banyana beat them 2-1 in Rabat; the perfect beginning. They nearly messed it up, though, scraping to a narrow victory against Botswana.
At the end of it all, they had a little luck in a controversial semifinal against Zambia to reach the final against Morocco, which they won. It was the greatest night of their lives. The Moroccan fans were fiercely partisan. Lights had been shone in the Banyana players’ eyes and they were abused from the stands. They withstood the battering, both on and off the pitch, and won 2-1.
In so doing, they not only became African champions but qualified for the 2023 World Cup.
When Ellis attended the World Cup draw last October, she said all the right things about being drawn with Sweden, Italy and Argentina. Secretly, she was concerned.
The draw established that the South Africans would be based in wet and windy Wellington. Deep down, she knew it would be a struggle.
Banyana’s match against Sweden was played in atrocious conditions, and the Wellington wind howled for the full 90 minutes in the Italy match. Against the Italians Banyana played some neat, crafty football, but they also defended naively.
Broadly speaking, it’s been an unusual World Cup. Germany and Brazil have gone home early. Nigeria deservedly beat hosts Australia 3-2. Favourites England, France and Japan have impressed, while the US have — counter-intuitively — struggled. There have been feisty displays by Colombia and Jamaica.
There’s even been some light relief amid the agonies of scoring an extra-time winner against Italy. Ellis doesn’t seem to be on very good terms with her beanie. It slides off her head, she adjusts it. It happens all over again.
Could it be that Ellis’s head is getting too big for her boots? Not likely. Desiree’s just not that kind of gal.
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