My muscles are aching and my face is sunburnt but I feel great.
On Sunday I played in a charity footy match called the Community Cup alongside a bunch of media peeps and musos. There weren’t many chicks on our team — four in total — but we played hard and dutifully followed our one instruction, which was to “kick the fucking ball”.
I haven’t played footy in ages. When I was a toddler my uncles would dress me up in a tiny yellow-and-black Richmond uniform and we’d play kick-to-kick in my nan’s backyard with a soft plushy football.
In primary school I’d muck around with the boys playing “markers up” in the quadrangle. We’d “specky” off each other’s shoulders, kiss the bitumen then jump right back up, hungry for more.
In high school I pretty much stopped playing footy — it was one of those things along with Girl Guides and leg hair that was stripped from your life once you got savvy with the social “laws” of being a teenage girl. I’d often gaze at the boys on the oval at lunchtime, wishing I could tackle them.
Then in Year 11 my school started a girls’ footy team. By this stage I was over stressing about what people thought of me and joined the team along with the other sporty chicks — of course as I later found out, a generous handful of us were fond of wrestling ladies on and off the field. Missed opportunity at high school, however!
In my mid-20s I got involved in footy again — this time not as a player but as a filmmaker. I met some mad-keen girl footy players at a lesbian bar one night and decided to make a doco about them, Girls Kick Balls.
Over the course of my filming I learnt that at least 90 percent of the team had slept with each other and that you’d have a better chance of scoring at a girls’ footy match than you would at the Sly Fox on a Wednesday night.
Maybe one day I’ll start a seniors’ footy team. I’ll smash right through the social “laws” of being an old lady and start speckying off the backs of old blokes on the bowling green.
