/ 18 December 2004

Mexican football club signs woman

A Mexican professional football club has made history by signing a woman. The move has already caused an uproar, but the player is undeterred.

”I’m not frightened of anything,” Maribel Dominguez told reporters at a packed press conference called by the second-division club Celaya.

”I want to thank all those who believe in me and ask those who don’t to give me the chance to try. Maybe I will fail, but at least I will have tried.”

Player and club insist there is nothing in the rules prohibiting women from playing in the professional men’s leagues. They are waiting for Fifa to endorse the move.

Generally accepted as the best female footballer in Mexico, Dominguez scored 45 goals in 46 matches for the women’s national side. Her squad reached the quarterfinals at the Athens Olympics, while the men’s team was eliminated in the first round.

The 26-year-old striker’s determination to play is already sending shockwaves through Mexico, with the debate it has provoked going far beyond football.

”I am deeply proud,” commentator Roman Revueltas wrote in the Milenio newspaper. ”In this land of ours famous for machismo, it seems we are now among the most open, modern, unprejudiced and tolerant.”

The sceptics, meanwhile, have focused on what they insist are the inescapable physical limitations of being female.

But Dominguez said she is ready for the physical strains and the taunts she expects from the terraces.

She recalled how her primary-school headmaster once threatened her with expulsion if she continued playing football with the boys.

”I didn’t pay any attention then,” she said. — Guardian Unlimited