ABU DHABI // A five-time Fifa Women’s Player of the Year, league titles won with sides in Brazil, Sweden and the United States.
At the age of 29 it would be an understatement to say that Marta has already established herself as one of the greatest female players of all time.
The only thing missing from her trophy cabinet is international success with Brazil.
The seventh staging of the women’s World Cup, being held in Canada, began on Saturday, and Brazil, who are in Group E, begin their campaign today against South Korea.
Brazil have yet to win the tournament. The closest they came to success was in 2007, in China, when, inspired by Marta, they reached the final, only to lose 2-0 to Germany in Shanghai.
Marta scored seven goals in that tournament, and she was voted its best player. She added four more to her personal tally in 2011 as Brazil reached the quarter-finals before losing to the United States on penalties.
She is the joint-record scorer in World Cup history with 14, having also scored thrice in the 2003 competition, and Brazil’s hopes of winning the elusive trophy will rest with her again over the next month.
“I do not see it as extra pressure because I am used to always being pressured,” she said through a translator while on a visit to Abu Dhabi last month for the International Conference of Sports for Women.
“I am very competitive and throughout my whole life the biggest pressure on me is what I put on myself. In Brazil there is this common feeling that we always need to be first, we are very competitive. So this is something that is very normal to me.”
Marta, who plies her trade domestically for Swedish side Rosengard, errs on the side of caution when it comes to predicting Brazil’s chances of repeating their run to the final as they did in 2007.
“In 2007, we had three years with the same team,” Marta said. “Since 2004 we had the same team masterpiece, technically speaking, with the same players.
“The team today in Brazil is a different team with different players, young players, so really, my expectations are that we will find the right chemistry, the right feeling together on the pitch so we can come up with the best result possible.
“But the feeling for me individually, and I’m sure the same for my teammates, is that we’re going there to win.”
Marta is optimistic interest in women’s football will continue to grow over the next four weeks and believes that the location for this year’s tournament is ideal for achieving that.
“The Canadians they’re very competitive, they’re a country that really embrace women’s football,” she said.
“I think exposure-wise, media-wise, there will be greater coverage, not just for the Brazilian team but on a more global scale. I think women’s football has taken a major step forward and we will see that this year in terms of coverage.”
The ongoing World Cup is not the only big event on Marta’s schedule, with a home Olympics in Rio de Janeiro next summer also on the horizon.
One of the highlights of Marta’s career, she says, was playing in front of her compatriots in 2007 in the Pan American Games in Rio. She expects next summer to be even better, however, when the city hosts the Olympic Games.
“The difference between now and 2007 when the Pan American Games were held in Rio de Janeiro is that people didn’t even know that the Brazilian national women’s team existed,” she said.
“I think today people really watch, they like the women’s national team, people support it in Brazil, it’s become popular.
“My expectations are the best possible because it won’t only be one match where we have 70,000 people supporting us in the stadium, I think it’ll be like that from the first match until, I hope, the final.”
gcaygill@thenational.ae
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