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Chinese Whispers
Chinese Whispers
Some of the Untold Tales of a Footballer’s Life in China
by Maia Jackman & Jeremy Ruane
2002 was a big year in the lives of New Zealand women’s soccer internationals Maia Jackman and Simone Ferrara, with both securing short-term contracts to play professionally in the Chinese Women’s Super League, for Dalian Shide and Shanghai TV respectively.
That they went and returned has been fairly well documented by numerous media, but there is a lot more to be told about adventures such as this venture into professional women‘s soccer, which is largely unchartered territory for all but a handful of New Zealand women’s soccer’s finest.
So, armed with her well-thumbed pocket Chinese dictionary, Maia joined me for dinner one evening, and proceeded to wax lyrical about a footballer’s life in the world’s most populous nation, a story punctuated by any number of hilarious and hair-raising tales, some of which follow …
A Day In The Life
"One day, I had a local TV crew following me round. I was with a couple of my team-mates, and they’d film us wherever we went, even when we went to one of their homes for lunch. We went shopping, and wandered into a clothes shop, where the owner was not best pleased to see the cameras, and prompted us to make a hasty retreat.
"I couldn’t understand what was going on, but the cameraman and reporter spoke English, so they were able to explain. Apparently, the shop-owner does a lot of original design work, and she was mortified that rivals would see her work, make copies of it and claim it as their own!!"
Zzzz!!
"One thing they do a lot in China is sleep!! It’d be lights out at 10pm, and we’d be up at 7am for a 7.30am breakfast. Then between breakfast and lunch - about 11.30am - some of the players would go back to their rooms and sleep.
"After lunch, they’d do the same until it was time for training - the time for this varied depending on what time our next match was kicking off, so there were a couple of occasions when our only training session of the day would be at 7pm, which was a real drag.
"I’d be up at 6am most days to go for a run - fitness isn’t something they focus on greatly, interestingly enough. Instead, the Chinese do a lot of weight work, and as a result of the sheer volume of it, a lot of their players end up with knee (anterior and cruciate ligament) problems".
The Bike Ride
"On our last day in Shanghai before leaving, Simone bought a bicycle - she’d been borrowing bikes off her team-mates to get about. This bike had a pillion seat on, which made it ideal for the two of us to get around.
"We decided to go and check our emails, and the local email place was 10 minutes’ bike ride away. We set off, Simone at the wheel, and we’re all over the road - I mean, all over the road, kerb to kerb and all points in between.
"I said, ‘Perhaps I’d better steer’. ‘But you don’t know where we’re going’, replied Simone. ‘Well, give me directions as we go …’. So off we went, and the traffic in Shanghai …
"They have lights with an indicator board which counts down the time left till they turn green. When they turn green, it’s chaos - cars, bikes, pedestrians, tuk-tuks, they all go for it at once!! It’s real shut-your-eyes-and-hope-for-the-best stuff!!
"We got to a particular set of lights, and with about four seconds to go till they turned green, I just blatted it!! Simone covered her eyes - she couldn’t believe it!!"
Chatterbox!
"When our teams played each other, Simone and I got together afterwards, and went twenty-to-the-dozen, catching up in English. Our Chinese team-mates were all looking at us in amazement!!
"Simone’s a real chatterbox! Back home in the States, she’s on her phone virtually all the time, organising her life. If she’s off the phone, it’s highly likely she’ll be bombing around in her BMW Roadster, going here, there and everywhere.
"When we were talking, whoever was listening out of the two of us would do something the Chinese do, simply because we’d got so used to hearing them do it. After every few words spoken, whoever was being spoken to would go ‘Hm!’ ‘Hm!’ ‘Hm!’
"It was weird at first, but we got used to it, because it was a means of their understanding what was being said to them … I think!
"Later on, after Simone had gone back with her team, one of my friends came up to me and said, ‘Simone’, then, because she didn’t know the appropriate English word, made the hand-signal for talking, and said ‘Lots!!’"
Maia MacGyver
"My team-mates bought me all sorts of things, including food. One of the things they purchased was this jelly. Now it’s not like the jelly you buy here, which is sloppy and slippery, etc.. This one was pretty solid - you could cut it up, wave it round in the air, throw it and catch it, and it would retain its form.
"One of the things I pride myself on is not having footballers’ feet - odd-looking toe-nails and things! The boots I picked up from Adidas en route to the airport turned out to be half-a-size too small for me, which I only discovered upon my arrival in Dalian. It would have cost an arm and a leg to get the right ones sent over to me and this pair shipped back, so I opted to carry on.
"As you can imagine, my toe-nails went west, and I got massive blisters, too. The Chinese method of treating these problems was to stick some cotton wool and a plaster on them, which, it goes without saying, is no good at all!
"So I had this jelly, which I hadn’t touched. I cut it into strips, applied the strips to my blisters and toes, and kept them in place
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with strapping tape - it may not have been what it was meant for, but it certainly helped me over that problem!!"
Doctor Jackman, I Presume!
"I was trying to explain to my team-mates what I do for a living here, but they couldn’t understand what I meant by ‘physio’, because they don’t do much in that way over there, although they do have a team doctor, who has all sorts of things in his bag, such as strapping, pills, … you name it, it’s there.
"One of the players said to me, "Is it like doctor?", to which I half-nodded and replied, ‘Kind of’. Big mistake!! From then on, they’d come to me with all their aches and pains, saying ‘Is sore!’, and I’d fix them up.
"On one occasion, one of them came to me with a sore throat!! I’m like, ‘Well, keep right away from me, then!!’
"My team-mates, most of whom were around the age of 19-20, would say, ‘Team doctor, he bad - we no like! But you, good doctor!!’"
Travelling Light
"When I go over to China next season, I’ll only take a holdall with me - I didn’t need hardly any of the clothes I took with me, because everything was provided for us. We basically had three different sets of clothing which we were given to wear, and that was what we wore virtually all the time.
"Dalian was great - we would have had only a couple of days when I was there when it rained. For Simone in Shanghai, however, it rained practically every day, so part of her uniform were these ugly little water shoes!!
"Dalian was very similar to summer in Auckland, minus the unpredictability, weather-wise, but when we went to places like Sichuan, where we played in forty-plus-degree heat in long-sleeved shirts, it really became a mental thing to get through - it was really hard work".
Money Matters
"There were some problems for both Simone and I, in terms of our payments not having come through, and we were a couple of games away from leaving and getting rather nervous. As we didn’t know to whom we should turn, as you know, we contacted you, and NZS were on the case for us the very next day - thanks for that!
"It turns out that there had been a history of communication problems between the Chinese FA and various parties, including the clubs, and we were a victim of one of them. It was soon resolved, but my coach said next time to talk to him, and he would sort it out".
Accolades
"Just before I left, a TV crew was filming my coach and I at the airport, but what he was saying to me I couldn’t really understand, so I was doing a lot of smiling and nodding.
"Afterwards, what he’d said was explained to me - that of the ten imports who had come to China for the Chinese Women’s Super League, I was considered to be one of the best by the coaches of all the teams, something which my coach was very pleased with. If he was pleased, you can imagine how I was feeling!!
"They wanted me to stay, and asked if I would become a Chinese citizen! I said, ‘I think FIFA might have a problem with that, being a NZ international!’"
"Another TV interview - as a foreign player, I did a lot of them in China - asked, ‘When did you last play for NZ?’. ‘In 2000’, I replied.
"They looked at me blankly. ‘You mean 2002?’ ‘No, 2000 - our last game was in June of that year, against China!’ They were stunned".
"One of my team-mates was from Portugal, and she asked me if she’d make the NZ team. ‘Ten times over!!’, I replied - she is so talented. Her strengths are dribbling and beating opponents, but the way the game is played in China involves a lot of one-touch passing and movement, and she really struggled to adapt - she admitted it just wasn’t in her nature to play that way.
2003
"We’ve got our Women’s World Cup preparation tour to the USA, based in Dallas, two weeks prior to the qualifiers, and we head to Canberra direct from there. The finals are in September, which was when the league was finishing last season.
"The Chinese Women’s Super League will be taking place from May to July next year, with a couple of pre-season tournaments in March and April, and a post-season one in August, which looks like it will be a key part of the final preparations for the Chinese team, given their status as host nation of the finals".
Barring the unthinkable, Maia will be flying the Kiwi flag once again in the Chinese Women’s League next season, and hopes to be making another trip to China in September to play in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Wuhan and Chengdu, this time as part of the New Zealand Women’s World Cup squad.
Before then, however, she has another ambition she wants to fulfil - "Cracking 14 on the beep test!! The best I’ve ever done is 13-12, so I’m really going to go for it next year".
 "The best I've ever done is 13-12 ..."
R-E-S-P-E-C-T!!!
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