Opinion – Renata Mendonça: Pioneers return to selection in rescue of history erased by prejudice

There are times when the eyes speak. And when Meg, age 65, Pretinha, age 46, Roseli, age 52, Miriam, age 56, and so many others entered the locker rooms of Granja Comary last Sunday, they screamed.

The scenario is customary for players who wear the Brazilian national team jersey today. For them, who didn’t even have a uniform in the past, seeing their names on the back of a shirt from Brazil and their photos on the wall generates amazement. “Can I really take this home? Or do you have to return it at the end?” Fanta admits to having asked. The left side of the 1991 national team remembers that it was like that 30 years ago.

The clothes given by the CBF for the players to represent Brazil in the first women’s World Cup in history did not stay with them. They had to return to the top. From those times, what was left to save was the shin guard (cardboard), the boot and the few newspaper clippings that came out on them at the time.

Not telling a story is like trying to erase it. The CBF in past decades did everything so that no one would remember the existence of a women’s team. But these women and their memories held out.

And finally, they could be remembered, honored, recognized as the pioneers of women’s football in Brazil. A friendly match at Granja Comary brought together athletes who represented the team at the 1988 experimental World Cup and at the first World Cup in 1991. Upon arrival, the walls of the team’s training center hotel had their photos.

“A movie goes through your head to live all this. It was worth our fight. It shows that our history is alive. We are alive,” said Dilma Mendes, the coach who discovered Formiga, but who was unable to wear the national team’s shirt as a player because in her time, a woman who played football had to flee from the police – this because of a decree-law in effect from 1941 to 1979.

Profiled and hand in hand, they entered the field that in previous decades they could not step, let alone play. “They said we were going to ruin the lawn. We just ran around in the warm-up,” Roseli said.

The ball rolled, and what happened from then on is history. Story narrated and commented on by women, with Natália Lara, from SporTV, and Camila Carelli, from Rádio Globo, giving voice to the pioneering actions in the field.

Beautiful shots, great goals, saved penalties, some slips and lots of fun. There, they were free to play as perhaps they have never been in their careers, so marked by the fight against a prejudice that was even stronger – but that still insists on staying, while we resist without taking the field team out.

For the first time, the minimum: recognition. To name the pioneers who started women’s football in Brazil is to register, belatedly, the story they wrote. More missing.

“We ask for the possibility of accessing these CBF coaching courses. Or that they also study a retirement, like the one given to the 1958 and 1970 champions. Many of us need to make ends meet working as a driver, doing odd jobs . It is a recognition that we deserve for having contributed to this story,” said goalkeeper Meg.

What the pioneers experienced at Granja Comary on Sunday is what the Brazilian national team players experience today in any training session, in any game. But it is necessary to know where we came from to value each achievement and understand where we are going. The fruits that they reap today were planted by a lot of struggle from these women who are finally receiving the honors they deserve.