GET A LIFE

Getting to the grass roots of football

With the FIFA World Cup about to start, the spotlight is shining on the pinnacle of world football. But as Craig Sisterson discovers, the New Zealand game is extremely healthy at the lower levels too

Like tens of thousands of New Zealanders the length and breadth of our country, Thomson Wilson Law partner Michael Badham looks forward to pulling on his ‘soccer’ boots during the local season, and getting out on grassy fields for a good run around. But unlike most of the football-mad men and women of all ages and occupations who take the pitch each weekend hoping to have fun, play well, and get a win, Badham isn’t so worried about the game’s result. Sure, he wants to have fun and perform well too, but for him victory is being almost forgotten. For Badham is a senior referee for the Northern League – one of many lawyers around the country who are involved in football in a variety of ways at a variety of levels; as officials, players, coaches, and administrators.

With the All Whites doing us all proud by qualifying for the 2010 FIFA World Cup, where they’ll rub shoulders with the world’s best players and teams over the coming month, and the Wellington Phoenix having their best ever season in the A-League, the public’s recent footballing focus has understandably been on the higher levels of the game. But football has been strong and incredibly popular here at the ‘grass roots’ for many, many years.

Pulling on the boots
Given his lineage, Timpany Walton partner Maarten Dirkzwager says he was probably always destined to play the beautiful game rather than rugby. “I probably started when I was about five or six,” he says, remembering his earliest days as a youngster at Timaru club Northern Hearts. “My Dad grew up in Amsterdam in the days of Johan Cruyff, so he was always telling me football stories.” More than 20 years later, Dirkzwager is still in love with football, and still playing each week for Northern Hearts (he did take a hiatus from his childhood club while he was studying at University then overseas), which has been the strongest club in the area for many years. In recent years, Dirkzwager also played for a South Canterbury United team in the Dunedin league, although he’s had to ease off a little since he was made partner.

Zespri General Counsel Katherine Evans, who plays for Tauranga United AFC, also remains passionate about football more than two decades after first pulling on her boots as a kid in Ottawa, playing on summer evenings for the Kanata Soccer Club (it’s a little too cold and snowy in Ontario for football to be a midwinter sport there). “My parents enrolled me when I was about 10, and it was the start of a beautiful friendship.” Though Evans admits, with a laugh, that she felt a lot better about the friendship when she started being able to see the ball. “I used to be out there on the wing, and try to score goals. I wore glasses, and my parents wouldn’t let me play in them, so I wasn’t very good until I got contact lenses. The year I got contacts the first game I came out and scored five goals, and it was this revelation, people were saying ‘what happened to you?’.”

In contrast to Dirkzwager and Evans, who fell for football as youngsters, Henderson lawyer Greg Muller came to the round ball game after growing up playing rugby. “I only got involved in soccer in my mid 20s,” says Muller, a partner at Henderson firm Smith and Partners who plays for a Te Atatu club team in the Over-35s division. “Probably the bulk of my team, their backgrounds were either rugby or league and ultimately they have ended up playing soccer.” Muller particularly enjoys the accessibility of football for people of all ages. “The oldest guy in our team, ‘the Sociables’, is about 55 now… I mean, our club is only tiny, and it’s got three Over-35s teams. United Soccer 1 has four or five divisions of Over-35s.”

Before becoming a referee, Badham also enjoyed being able to play football into middle age, although like Dirkzwager and Evans he started young. “I started playing when I was about eight years old in Whangarei, for a club called Onerahi. I played from the age of eight to the age of about 46, with a gap at the end of secondary school and at University.”

For love of the game
Badham still retains his passion for football, though his involvement has now evolved from player to official. “I couldn’t realistically keep playing at the standard that I wanted to,” he says. “And if you’re not playing on the field, with refereeing you’ve actually got the best seat in the house really, haven’t you?” Although he admits there is probably some aspect of ‘giving something back’ to the game he loves – over the years he has also been a kids’ coach and a senior men’s coach – Badham says he also “gets a lot out of” being a football referee. Not that there aren’t challenges. “As a player you become very emotionally involved in the game, and that’s the same as a coach as well, and even as a spectator,” he says. “As a referee, you’ve got to view things very dispassionately and calmly if you’re going to be a good referee. You’ve got to tolerate a lot of abuse as a referee – it’s the same in a lot of sports, and soccer is no different.”

Evans has also been a player, coach, and referee over the 25 years she has been involved in football. “Obviously, there are people who play it because it’s a performance sport and they’re performance athletes, but I guess the key thing that’s come back to me is that it’s the number one sport played worldwide, and most people aren’t playing at the level of performance athletes, so they’re playing it for the love of the game, they’re playing it for their own reasons – they’re in there, running around, and loving it.”

The camaraderie and team spirit of football draws Dirkzwager in. “It’s also a great way, obviously, to keep doing something active. Our lives can become pretty sedentary being a lawyer. You get the chance to kick somebody, and they get the chance to kick you, which they all like to do,” he says with a chuckle. 

That unexpected physicality of football was a drawcard for Muller. “The game is actually far more physical than you would realise when you’re a rugby player and you think all soccer players are soft,” he says. “There’s a competitive element to it as well, and if you come from a rugby background, you can find the game quite rewarding, that side of it. But it’s also very skilful. Jeez, some of the guys we play against, who’ve been ex-National League players or whatever, you see some of the skills they possess and they’re absolutely outstanding. I remember playing down in a football tournament down in Mount Maunganui, and we played against [former All White] Fred de Jong, and yeah… his skills were just amazing. When you start playing the sport, it combines the two elements of physicality but also skill, which you don’t appreciate as a rugby player.”

Camaraderie and community
Muller also enjoys the camaraderie of playing both with guys his own age, and over a wide range of ages, in his Over-35s team. The team spirit goes beyond the team and filters through his Te Atatu club and into the wider community. “That’s what I think the key is with playing soccer, belonging to the club,” he says. “All of the teams go back to the club, so that on a Saturday we usually spill out of the club, the club’s usually overflowing. If the first team plays away, the majority of those guys will end up coming back to the club. All of the social teams, the Over-35s, will always come back to the club, and that’s every Saturday, and that’s religious. It creates a real friendly atmosphere, everyone knows each other, everyone pretty much knows everyone else on a first name basis, knows their background, knows their wives, and their children all go to the club – there are teachers from the local primary school playing in the club. So, really, it reminds me of rugby when I was playing in the 1980s, you know that everyone went up to the club, your mothers, your sisters, your grandparents, and soccer is a lot more like that. Whereas, I’ve been back to the rugby club I played at, and it’s not like that any more.”

Muller has also helped nurture that community atmosphere at his Te Atatu club by giving his time on the Committee. “Like any club these days, they basically run on volunteers. I was the Treasurer, and when I first got involved, they didn’t have very good systems in place, and I guess one thing being a lawyer teaches you is to have good systems. So I implemented a few of those, and I think it’s made it easier for the subsequent Treasurer to carry on.”

Dirkzwager likewise stepped in to help his club, as Secretary and a junior coach, and enjoys the community spirit of the grass-roots game. His father and family still come along to watch him play. Although he used to find it a bit embarrassing as a child, he now admits that he “quite likes” the sideline support.

Evans has also seen the community spirit of grass-roots football up close – she recalls being amazed when she was playing some games last year in a local women’s social league in the Bay of Plenty. “I would say most of them were in their 40s, late 40s, women who’d never ever played before, and they were having so much fun. Frankly, the level of soccer wasn’t that high, but they were just loving it. All the families had come down, all the kids and all the husbands, and everyone was having fun, and it was just a really, really good feeling. Often that gets lost sight of, because everyone is just focusing on the high performers… and that’s absolutely fair and reasonable, but at the same time, it’s the grass roots of the game that makes it what it is, in my view, all the people who go out just to play because they love the sport. All the supporters that go out maybe because they know someone playing or it’s their club. It’s just this very powerful, emotional game that sucks people in. It can be incredibly tactical, physical, and high level, but it can just be amazing to watch at any level, even if it’s five and six-year-old kids playing. And it’s just amazing to watch how people can get into it.”

Badham, Dirkzwager, Muller, and Evans all intend to “get into it” as screen spectators over the coming month, supporting the All Whites at the 2010 FIFA World Cup as well as enjoying many of the other games. And just who do our footballing foursome think will come out on top at the end of the tournament?

“Either Spain or Brazil,” says Badham. “I hope it’s a team that plays an attractive, attacking side of football. I’m a defender myself, and I admire good defense, but in the end, there’s nothing better than a real attacking game.” Evans likewise goes for Brazil, although she’d love to see New Zealand come from nowhere – “think of what it would do for our movie industry, we could make a great movie about it!”. Dirkzwager also goes for “Brazil or Spain”, although he confesses that he’s “wishing for the Netherlands – although that’s being overly optimistic, we are due”. Only the rugby player turned football fanatic steers away from the two pre-tournament favourites (and top two FIFA-ranked sides in the world). “I’m going to go with Argentina,” says Muller. “I just think with Messi, Tevez, any one of those guys is going to be a superstar at the World Cup.”

Whichever way it ends up, it should be a mouth-watering month of beautiful games.

NZLawyer magazine, issue 138, 11 June 2010