![]() There were no sponsors, few fans, and little money to be made from the beautiful game. Though they were international athletes, for the majority of players it was a struggle to work, train and survive. With a home Olympics on the horizon, Australia’s women’s football team, better known as the Matildas, needed money to help prepare for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on home soil. “We wanted to rock the boat,” Boyd tells CNN Sport. There was a storm brewing in the Australian capital and the country’s women’s football team was in the eye of it. In the autumn of 1999, Katrina Boyd and her teammates assembled at the Australian Institute of Sport for a photo shoot they all knew would make headlines. Stir it up, cause a fuss, rip up the rule book and watch the masses react. We usually cheer for the team that has a skilled player, or a team that’s wearing the jersey of one of our favourite clubs.īut better than just watching a pelada is to play one and pretend you’re in Maracana as the ace of your childhood dreams - the ace that doctors, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, butchers, bakers, businessmen, dentists and photographers always dreamed of being.Sometimes, the only way to get noticed is to be controversial, to be out of the ordinary. Today when we walk by a pelada, either on the street or in some abandoned lot or on the beach, it’s impossible not to stop and watch for a few minutes. I still remember scoring a few goals and screaming, “GOOOOOOOOOOOOAL by Fisher.” Fisher was an Argentine player, idol on my favourite team, Botafogo. In those peladas each of us became the pro player we considered idol, and for each goal scored we’d celebrate as if the sidewalk were a huge, packed grandstand. We would also organise matches on our streets against kids from other neighbourhoods. We all wanted to be pro soccer players, but on the beach we wanted to be Columbia players. My friends and I would go early to the beach to play our own pelada before Columbia’s matches. In the 1960’s I used to love going to watch the league tournaments on the beach, with teams that played 11 a side, unlike the normal beach soccer of just five. It was on the streets, on the dirt fields and on the beaches that we became the stars of own childhood dreams. But Sundays were always, and still are today, the classic day of the peladas. Streets didn’t have nearly the traffic they do nowadays and we turned them into a stage for peladas every afternoon after school. When I was a kid peladas didn’t have to compete with video games for players. One thing is certain – pelada has nothing to do with a naked woman. We often say, if a First Division match is boring, “What a pelada!” The term has also been adopted to refer to a bad professional match. While pro soccer fields are beautiful carpets of well-manicured grass, the peladas are usually played on just dirt and sand. The version that strikes me as most coherent is in reference to the fields where weekend matches are played - most of them are grassless, or ‘naked’, as the description fits. One version talks of street soccer where everyone plays barefoot, or with ‘naked’ feet, running after the ball without a referee or any regard for rules. In English ‘pelada’ means ‘naked’ in the feminine gender, but none of the answers I found has to do with playing the sport with no clothes on. Why do we Brazilians refer to our neighbourhood soccer matches as ‘peladas’? A search on the web brings up many answers, but not one is really definitive. ![]() "It was on the streets, on the dirt fields and on the beaches that we became the stars of own childhood dreams."
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