By Atty. Jijil Jimenez
Back when she was knee-high to a grasshopper, I gave my daughter a soccer ball with a solemn promise that if she plays the game, the Philippines will play in the World Cup in her day.
I held the ball before her like a golden orb, and to the imaginary tintinnabulation of tinker bells, conjured before her widening eyes a magical world without wars, where only little girl from many nations vye with each other for glory in the world’s greatest stage ever, playing the world’s most beautiful game ever, and ever, cross my heart. She has played soccer since.
It was pure theatrics us fathers love to play with our daughters when they are still small, but I had my high school varsity soccer playing days and I believed it, too, the magic only toned down a bit. But our girls playing at the World Cup? Why did I say that!
That was magic moment, nothing more. When did a father ever shy away from grandiloquent hyperboles with children at the age of belief, where dreams have no limit and everything is possible and within reach of their tiny hands.
Sure, I have always believed we will crash into the World Cup, someday. It was an indeterminate dream, without deadlines. Often, it gets lost in the dense and dim thicket of life’s more practical order but it’s there, lurking somewhere. I secretly clung to it with the heart of a boy dreaming boyish dreams. I clung to it like I clung to my college fraternal ties with Dan Palami, our football renaissance man. I was looking to Dan to accomplish the biggest dream of our small community of fanatics in our little neck of the mammoth global football woods, with the men’s team.
Late last Sunday evening, my daughter barged into the quiet of my little study at home and, with eyes wild like a startled doe and a voice like the crack of a whiplash, blurted: Papa, turn your TV on! The Philippines plays Chinese Taipei now. We could get into the World Cup, tonight!
No further words were needed. I shot out of my chair with alacrity and, after much fumbling with the remote, found the right channel in the right TV. We got into the game just right after whistle’s start.
It was an even match in the first half, but our girls enjoyed a clear advantage in ball possession. A good sign. When striker Quinley Quesada converted a Katrina Guillou header with a brilliant outside of the foot flick to score four minutes into the second act, I started to pop my first beer. My Cup of dreams now runneth over, I thought. But then Chinese Taipei’s Zhuo Li-ping a shot a scintillating meteor into the net in the dying minutes of regulation time to equalize 1-1.
I slumped back into my chair to the sound of shocked lamentations from my daughter. It was difficult to bear. The dreaded penalty shoot-out loomed like PAGASA’s dire warnings of a super typhoon making a beeline pointing straight to home. And it did, when thirty minutes of extra time passed and both sides, despite heroic efforts, failed to break the deadlock.
A penalty shootout is anyone’s game. It requires steady nerves that comes of confidence borne of sheer experience. Chinese Taipei has been there before, and it was all new to us. No Philippine football team, men or women, have ever come within a game of qualifying for the AFC Asia Women’s Cup semi-finals and the FIFA World Cup before our National Women’s Football Team, the Malditas, did with Sunday’s match. I did not know how they will handle the intense pressure.
The darkest moment came when Chinese Taipei went ahead 3-2 and needing only to slot in one more goal to win with both teams on the last of their regulation five kicks. Philippine goalkeeper, Olivia McDaniel, foiled their last shot and proceeded to score with our last kick herself to equalize and bring the heart-stopping showdown to sudden death. She then stopped the Taiwanese again and striker Sarina Bolden clinched the game, and the World Cup ticket, with a crisp lowball ball to the left of the goalpost that landed straight inside the net.
There was clearly talent on both sides, but we were banking on hope and faith, not experience, and the girls delivered.
Football, especially men’s, is the most popular game in the world and the FIFA World Cup is the biggest show on earth, bigger than the Olympics itself. No other pursuit short of war could whipped up greater national partisan pride. In fact, a football match triggered a shooting war between El Salvador and Honduras in 1969. There were other underlying causes for that war but, even today, the sport remains a tool of geopolitical rivalry among the world’s regional and global powers.
These are not, however, the real reasons to support our girls and our World Cup dreams. Not even play football itself. It is simply because it is a beautiful game. It fosters creativity in children at play, makes us dream of things greater than ourselves, even those that defy our current realities.
The stunning Malditas victory almost came out of nowhere. Very few Filipinos watch football. Most of us were already asleep Sunday night when our girls played that historic match. But when the nation woke up the next morning, our children suddenly have brand new role models, right at home, to inspire them to heights of achievement. This is priceless.
Our girls now face formidable Republic of Korea on Thursday for the semi-finals of the AFC Women’s Asian Cup which also serves as a qualifier for 2023 World Cup in Australia.
We should all be out there rooting for them. It is no longer just about football. It has gone beyond sports. In these challenging times for the nation, who knows? It could be about you and me.
After Bolden’s cannonball hit history, I saw them in all the different shapes and colors of the great Filipino diaspora, screaming their hearts out with girlish abandon, their faces masks of jubilation mixed with disbelief. I suddenly realized they were just really ordinary young girls in the first blush of youth who showed us all what extraordinary feats could come of striving with abiding faith and boundless hope.
I am now in my 50s and the Malditas made me wonder if I ever stopped believing and stopped growing. If I did, then they just made me believe and, perhaps, grow some more.
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Editor’s Note: Atty. Angelo “Jijil” Jimenez is Of Counsel at the Jaromay and Laurente and Associates and contributes thought pieces to various digital publications on a range of topics. He is an expert on international migration issues, having been Labor Attaché to Japan, Kuwait and Iraq and Deputy Administrator on the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration (OWWA). He is also a lecturer on Philippine overseas employment laws at the UP Law Center’s Mandatory Continuing Legal Education (MCLE) program. He was a member of the University Philippines Board of Regents, the highest policy-making body of the UP System, from November 2017 to July 2021. He may be reached by liking and following his blog page on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/obtuse101