When Desiree Ellis earned her first international cap, she also lost her day job.
It was May 1993 and Ellis, now the head coach of the South Africa team preparing for their second World Cup, was picked as part of the first squad of players to represent their country in a women’s football match. They were up against their neighbours Swaziland (now Eswatini) in a Sunday fixture in Johannesburg. Ellis travelled the 780 miles from her home in Cape Town by bus, a journey which took around 18 hours and was one of the stars of a dominant performance for the Banyana Banyana.
She scored a hat-trick in a 14-0 win and celebrated briefly with her teammates before making the trip back in time for the work week. On the way, “we got a puncture, and it took us some time to get it fixed”, she tells Moving the Goalposts. The delay meant Ellis arrived late to the butchery where she mixed spices for a living. “When I got there, they told me I had absconded and I was fired. After that, I was out of work for three years.”
In that time, Banyana Banyana played eight more matches as Ellis reached the age of 33. Though her playing career would last another six years, and she would captain the team, football could never provide a sustainable income and her search for employment continued. Eventually, she was hired as a door-to-door salesperson and then as a picture editor for a publishing company that specialised in sports magazines, which allowed her to be more immersed in what she loved. But it was only when Ellis was named as an ambassador for the 2010 World Cup and opportunities in broadcasting opened for her, that football began to pay her back. Does she ever feel it took too long? “Not at all. Our generation had to start somewhere.”
Ellis went on to serve as the national assistant coach under Vera Pauw between 2014 and 2016 and then took over from the Dutchwoman in an interim capacity before being named head coach in February 2018. Under Ellis, South Africa reached the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (Wafcon) final in 2018, qualified for the World Cup for the first time the year after, won Wafcon in 2022 and are back in this year’s World Cup. While most teams have star players – and Racing Louisville’s Thembi Kgatlana is one of South Africa’s – Ellis is their talisman, especially after her achievements this year.
She was awarded South Africa’s the Order of Ikhamanga in gold – a presidential award which she compares to a knighthood – and is the subject of a mural in Salt River, the area of Cape Town where she spent her school days. He has also brought out an autobiography titled Magic. “We don’t do things for awards and rewards,” she says, but insists these ones were special.
“I wasn’t present at the unveiling of the mural but when I saw it at first hand, it was very emotional,” she admits. “It’s just another way of saying to young girls that anything is possible, even if it doesn’t happen immediately. Keep believing and keep hoping that that is going to happen, but make sure that when that does happen, that you are ready.”
Her biggest test will come in making sure South Africa are ready after a bumpy buildup, which included the boycott of a warm-up match and a dispute over pay. Four days before the squad was due to depart for the World Cup, they refused to play a friendly match against Botswana in protest over what they perceived to be weak opposition on a substandard pitch and concerns over the financial remuneration players would receive. While the numbers were being worked out, the South African Football Association instructed Ellis to pick a makeshift side, who went on to lose 5-0.
Since then, South Africa’s players have been promised not only the $30,000 (£23,185) Fifa has made available to every participating player in the group stage but an additional $12,000 each, funded by the CAF president and billionaire businessman, Patrice Motsepe. There is still uncertainty over what the support staff will earn but the touring party are in New Zealand and beat Costa Rica 2-0 in Christchurch to conclude preparations.
That victory, against a side ranked 18 places above them, bodes well for a South Africa side that have yet to win a game or secure a point at a World Cup and have plenty to prove. “When you look at the men’s World Cup recently, they’ve shown you that the rankings don’t really matter at the tournament,” Ellis says. “Morocco were not destined to come out of their group and to be honest, they almost won the World Cup. They had belief, they had a plan and they stuck to that plan. That’s going to be key.”
But even with Ellis’s praise for development programmes across the continent in countries such as Tanzania and fellow World Cup participants Morocco, their teams are often hamstrung by lack of regular competition against better opposition and for Ellis that has to change. “The gap is starting to close between Africa and the rest of the world but we need more competition,” she says. “Getting more quality opposition will really help. It’s fairly easy for them in Europe to get on a bus and cross a border and play a higher-ranked team, and that’s what we need to get more of.”
As long as the bus doesn’t break down on the way back.
Recommended viewing
Think it’s only men’s football highlights that go viral? Think again. The French Football Federation’s sponsor, Orange, launched an advertising campaign before the Women’s World Cup which makes a clever and quirky statement about the quality of the women’s game. The video begins with a selection of goals scored by Antoine Griezmann, Kylian Mbappé, Olivier Giroud, Ousmane Dembélé and Kingsley Coman … except it isn’t them. The second half of the reel shows that the men’s faces have been superimposed on to the bodies of Sakina Karchaoui, Estelle Cascarino, Eugénie Le Sommer, Viviane Asseyi and Selma Bacha, respectively. The message? Women’s football is as eye-catching as men’s, of course. See the advert for yourself.
Une compilation des 𝙢𝙚𝙞𝙡𝙡𝙚𝙪𝙧𝙚𝙨 𝙖𝙘𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙩𝙧𝙞𝙘𝙤𝙡𝙤𝙧𝙚, pas mal pour passer l’été, non ? 🤩 pic.twitter.com/Nj54HT3HVB
— Team Orange Football (@TeamOrangeFoot) July 10, 2023
Moving the Goalposts will be sent out twice a week during the Women’s World Cup. To subscribe to the full edition, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
Have a question for our writers – or want to suggest a topic to cover? Get in touch by emailing moving.goalposts@theguardian.com or posting BTL.
