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Sudanese women play first competitive soccer
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 23
Feb 2006 15:32:36 GMT
By Opheera McDoom
KHARTOUM, Feb 23 (Reuters) - After five years of playing her first
love soccer behind closed doors in Sudan where Islamic laws restricted
female sports, Sara Edward is finally playing a match against other
women in public.
Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt with no head covering, sweating
19-year-old Edward is the captain of the "Challenge" soccer
team which is among six teams of young women who have battled to
break traditional values in Sudan and hope to form a national competitive
team.
"In the beginning we had sharia (Islamic law) here and people
didn't want women to play football," Edward told Reuters on
Thursday.
Religious freedom was a key issue in a bitter north-south civil
war in Sudan but, since a peace deal last year, sharia has been
more loosely applied in the north.
Women in Khartoum in the past were forced cover their heads and
wear long skirts. But the appropriately named Challenge team refuse
to wear those clothes.
"It is too difficult for them to play when wearing head covering,"
said Michael Archangelo, the team's coach.
Some of the opposite team, from the Sudan University, were playing
dressed in head coverings and long trousers, hot work under the
blistering desert sun in Khartoum.
After years of fighting with the authorities, who blocked their
work to form a competitive women's league, the teams are at last
playing in the first public league. Thursday was the second match
in that league.
Organisers said the 2005 peace deal which ended Africa's longest
civil war in Sudan's south was key to opening the way for them to
begin playing.
"Of course after the peace society has become much more open
-- anyone can wear whatever they want, for example," said Edward,
whose favourite soccer team is Brazil because she says she likes
their flair.
Religious freedom was a frontline issue in the conflict, which
pitted the Islamist Khartoum government against the mostly Christian
and animist south.
Since the deal a new coalition government has been formed and a
new constitution agreed protecting the religious rights of non-Muslims
in the capital.
The girls have a long way to go before they make it to the World
Cup, as many took wild swipes at the ball and missed.
But budding talent was clear as some showed off tricks with the
balls at half-time to an audience of giggling young men on the sidelines.
Challenge under Edwards' leadership won 2 : 1 against Sudan University,
and she said she wanted most to make the national team, which they
hope to form in April at the first women's football tournament in
Sudan.
"We were the ones who first established football here, of
course I want to make the national team" she said.
But they need support from the Sudanese football association which
has so far not donated any money to the women, who fund their own
activities and make their own kit.
The facilities could do with work too, as they played on a dusty,
uneven pitch full of holes, with the lines so faded it was difficult
to tell where the playing field ended.
The soccer coach at Sudan University, Ahmed Adam, said he hoped
to expand women's soccer to the schools and introduce young girls
to the sport from an early age.
"I want to collect the girls and form five-a-side teams to
expand the sport," he said. "People can see now that girls
can play football in Sudan."
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/MCD345407.htm
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