By George Bermudez
My first love was football. I first kicked a white ball with black spots at Don Bosco Makati as a grade-schooler. Kicking and running and kicking some more until I’m right in front of a goal ready to smash that ball behind the sticks into the net, it was exhilarating for a kid like me back then.
To me, it was the coolest thing ever. I played in the school football team from primary until secondary school. I played in the inter-college games at the University of Santo Tomas and even coached our college’s ladies’ team. But alas, like many football lovers in the Philippines of my generation, it all ended after our university days.
There was no real league to get excited about, no real local team to support. However, the love for the sport remains in our hearts. It’s pure passion. It’s an understanding that simple as the game maybe – after all, it’s just all about kicking a ball – the ultimate reward for all that running and kicking is a goal.
Football taught me so many things. I learned the value of working hard to achieve a goal, but even better is that goals are easier to achieve if there is teamwork. As it is in life, one can never always win, even the best teams can lose but showing up and giving your all in those 90 minutes is always a win. Football can be a struggle, everyone has to put in the hard work to earn something and to me this is a reflection of life in our own country.
As a football fanatic from the Philippines, I have always looked outside our archiplelago for inspiration. The Brazilian Ronaldo for me is still the best forward and teams like Barcelona, Real Madrid, Manchester United and even Chelsea caught my eye. But as I moved to the UK to work as a nurse, I set my allegiance with the best London football club – Arsenal.
There are so many Filipinos like me whose football craving was satisfied by our foreign heroes and teams. Smart, agile, resilient: these are characteristics of us Filipinos that translate well into football and yet it’s a sport which has always been in the background for us Pinoys. Thankfully, things have vastly changed in the last 10 years. The men’s national football team or Azkals’ resurgence in 2010 was a ray of hope for the sport. We have also seen the establishment of a functioning professional football league in the Philippines that allows us to develop local support, if not more awareness of the sport in our country. These were small steps that allowed us to progress in football.
Fast forward to today, our women’s national football team or Filipinas just made history, defeating World Cup co-host New Zealand with a score of 1-0. I hope our country has finally seen our potential in football. I hope we now realise how lucky we are because the world sees our Filipinas for how well they performed. The Filipinas had to fight tooth and nail to qualify for the World Cup for the first time, find a TV station to air their World Cup games, score their first ever goal in the World Cup and earn our country’s first ever win in the World Cup.
I beg our countrymen, please do not take your eyes off our brave and galant Filipinas. They are fighting for our pride – against all odds time and again, they have proven to be worthy of our love and support. Please remember they are our heroines who were putting in the graft in their craft even when nobody was looking their way. They are not in the World Cup because of luck, they worked harder than ever and now the results are coming in. And let us all support them in any way we can especially as this World Cup progresses.
Maybe they qualify for the next stage or maybe they get eliminated in this World Cup, but for me, the Filipinas have already won. They have rekindled in me that passion and love I have for football way back when I was a kid growing up in Manila. I just hope that the Philippines, too, have found new heroes to stand by because they have shown that hard work, teamwork and resilience lead to winning. Many congratulations to the whole Filipinas team – you truly deserve to be on the world’s biggest stage. We now have our very own football legends to talk and sing about.
About the author
George Bermudez is a Filipino nurse who has worked across different specialties in the UK. He currently works at Vitality UK as a Team Leader Nurse Examiner. He is the co-founder of Filipino UK Nurses Community, an online community for Filipino nurses with over 16,000 active members. They offer weekly articles and host monthly webinars that help nurses in their struggles in living and working in Britain.
