Bowing Out A Winner

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Bowing Out A Winner

Football Fern Bex Bows Out A Winner

by Jeremy Ruane

So she leaves the building as quietly as she entered, closing the door on her playing career as one marked "FIFA Head of Women's Football", and all the opportunities and challenges that role entails, opens invitingly before her.

While in New Zealand's midst, however, she made quite a significant impact, playing a major role in the raising of both standards and expectations of the country of her parents' birth where women's football was concerned.

She, of course, is Rebecca Smith, the 74-times-capped Football Ferns defender, who led her country into action in a record 45 of those internationals, the last of which was the 2012 Olympic Women's Football Tournament quarter-final against her native USA.

The Duke University graduate first appeared on New Zealand's radar in 2000 - she was an eager observer of the Pacific Cup tournament in Newcastle and Canberra, although she'd far rather have been playing.

When she finally got to wear the silver fern, it was when the SWANZ, as they were then known, next played, at the Oceania Women's World Cup qualifying tournament in Canberra in 2003 - the days of the Football Ferns being shown live on TV, and playing on average an international every month, were but a pipe dream back then.

Yes, this was an era in which our national women's team played just fifteen internationals between November 1998 and October 2006. A scandalous tally, when one looks back now, but that's what our elite women's players had to endure less than a decade ago.

You can just picture the reaction of Rebecca's FIFA Women's World Cup winning German team-mates at both FFC and FSV Frankfurt - she played for both clubs in the 2004-5 Frauen Bundesliga season - to this news when the subject of New Zealand's upcoming international plans was broached, and how much it must have irked their Kiwi team-mate to admit the lack of same at the time.

There were changes afoot on the home front, however, not the least of which was Australia's switch of Confederation, from Oceania to Asia, thus paving the way for New Zealand to become the region's pre-eminent footballing nation in the women's game once again.

No longer would our European-based star, by now sporting the colours of Sunnana SK in Sweden's Damellsvenskan, be on the outside looking in where discussions about international plans were concerned. For the Football Ferns had to shape up and get competitive sharpish, given Women's World Cup and Olympic Women's Football Tournament qualification were all but a given.

Needless to say, they have done that and then some, with the 2007 FIFA Women's World Player of the Year nominee a decidedly prominent figure in this country's rise to their current top-twenty ranking.

It's a journey which has often been frustrating - think draws and odd-goal defeats - and occasionally painstaking - the odd hiding and those all-too-frequent defeats at the hands of our West Island counterparts instantly spring to mind.

But more often than not in recent times, it's been exciting fare for fans of the women's game in this country, with the seeds sown in the mid-2000s' revitalisation of the Football Ferns now reaping rewards aplenty.

Bex, of course, has led from the front in many of these recent successes. Her late goal against Mexico at Sinsheim in 2011 made the prospect of a maiden point at a FIFA Women's World Cup Finals a possibility which was realised just moments later as

the Football Ferns' insatiable self-belief and never-say-die approach earned them a 2-2 draw.

And it was our captain who headed home another goal for her country a year later, the first in a 3-1 win over Cameroon which saw the Football Ferns enter uncharted territory for a football team representing New Zealand - the quarter-finals of a major tournament, in this case the 2012 Olympic Games.

That last-eight encounter with the USA was to prove the footballing swansong for the 2011 Oceania Football Confederation's Women's Player of the Year, who, after her three-season stint with Sunnana, enjoyed a season in the sun with the Newcastle Jets in the Australian W-League before the final move of her playing career took her back to where her professional career began.

VfL Wolfsburg were a low-to-mid-table team when they added the New Zealand international to their playing roster in February 2009. Four seasons on, they are champions of both Germany and Europe.

Bex was unable to contribute to their on-field success in her final season with the club, as the knee injury which has dogged her career since prior to the 2007 FIFA Women's World Cup Finals finally forced her hand playing-wise.

Wolfsburg hadn't forgotten her contribution to their rise to prominence, however, and when the UEFA Women's Champions League gongs were being presented after the 2013 final, among the recipients was a very proud Kiwi, the only winner's medal she received during a nine-season career in the highest echelons of European women's club football.

It was a fitting finale for Rebecca Smith, whose retirement from the playing side of the game she loves will provide another challenge for the Football Ferns. There are numerous contenders who will vie for her number six jersey in the months and years to come, but as for replacing the leadership qualities she boasts in abundance … that will take a collective effort from all those who have directly benefited from same.

Needless to say, whenever they are in action in future, and their former team-mate is watching, the Football Ferns can expect encouragement aplenty, even though it's going to take quite an effort for a certain newly appointed FIFA staff member to suppress the urge to shout her "GO NOO ZEALAND!!" catch-cry!

Rebecca Smith