Other Articles Home
From Russia With Love
Dunga looks to the future
My Friend Who Played With Pelé
Salvador Dally
Fatso or Fenomeno?
The Romance of the Copa Brasil
The Little Canary
The Transformation of Atlético Paranense
Footvolley
Rugby in Brazil? Don't Laugh!
Canadian Joe Raso
|
 |
By George Lees
Click here to see recent tournament pictures.
Brazilian football genius is honed on the beach. The combination of canary yellow shirts and blue shorts is the obvious allusion to this, but it isn’t until walking onto the sand in Rio de Janeiro that you’ll know for sure.
It was here that I witnessed a game of footvolley for the first time.
The two-a-side game first emerged in the early 1960s as a sporting fusion between football and volleyball. Throngs of beach soccer players were forced off the sands at Copacabana and Ipanema by an increasing numbers of sunbathers. Rather then give their ball up to the cult of the body beautiful the footballers hijacked nearby volleyball courts and continued to hone their techniques over the high nets they found there.
Thirty years after the game’s inception I joined a large crowd a little further up Rio’s coastline to watch two teams spar. I was quickly impressed by the ease with which the players kept the ball airborne over the high net. Each player moved with poise over the thick sands to meet the ball with a cushioned instep, a flick of the shoulder or pump of the chest, an overhead kick or deft header. It was several minutes before a point was won and longer still before I realised who I was watching; Romário, the striker who’s goals had helped Brazil win its fourth World Cup only a few months earlier. Like his companions he seemed an unlikely figure without the ball, slightly solemn, squat and bow-legged, and wearing an unfashionable pink bandanna tied around his head. But with the ball in his possession he came alive, playing the game instinctively as if every rally had been choreographed.
On and off the pitch Romário has become something of a footvolley ambassador. There is a hint of the game in almost every goal he scored (and approaching his fortieth birthday is still scoring for Fluminense). The economy of movement and balance with which he receives the ball, the clever touches he uses to create space in confined areas, the cool finishes.
He is also inexorably linked with the game’s bad-boy image. Born to the Jacarézinho favela O Baixinho, or Shorty (to give him his Brazilian moniker), returned to Rio de Janeiro as the World Cup’s Golden Boot winner. After sojourns at PSV Eindhoven and Barcelona - where his hedonistic exploits along side Hristo Stoichkov were almost as legendary as their goal-scoring feat - he declared himself finally bored of Europe. In truth his position in Catalonia had become untenable. On his return Zico disparagingly described him as "a nightclub man," and Romário himself made no secret of his predilections: "The night is my friend, in my private life I do what I want." Edmundo, Djalminha, Giovanni, Ronaldo and Ronaldinho might share that opinion. It seems that in Brazil extravagant football and a rebellious streak go together with footvolley.
"Sure, it’s about fun, it’s a beach game, but it’s also a serious sport. Above everything it’s a great game to watch and play. When it’s played well it is captivating. I’d love to bring Romário over to show us all how it’s done." So says Nicholas Dugdale-Moore of the UK Footvolley Association and the man hoping to bring giant sandpits to every spare patch of park and garden he can find. "The fact that you live in London or Birmingham shouldn’t be an obstacle. I’ve just come back from a tournament in Brasilia. It's a real hot-bed for footvolley even though it's one of the few land-locked cities in the whole of the country. In countries like Holland and Austria the facilities are great. There’s no reason why footvolley can’t work here."
Dugdale-Moore has already led a British team in international competition in Miami against pairs from Brazil, USA, Portugal, Thailand, Italy, Canada, Holland, Austria, Colombia, France, Argentina, Spain, Mexico, Switzerland, Greece and Germany. "There were teams of Brazilian girls out there who were better than us. Mind you we’d been practicing in a sports hall up until then," he says with a laugh, "Now we’re sharing use of an indoor beach court in Oxfordshire with the beach volleyball players. Hopefully we’ll be challenging the better European teams before too long."
He is already tapping into London’s large Brazilian community and plans to send more teams to tournaments throughout the European summer including a small event on the beach at Croyde Bay, Devon. “We want to get more and more British kids playing footvolley. It's a great supplement to football. It’s fun in it’s own right and it’s a sport that is growing in popularity all over the World not only in Brazil. If nothing else it might spice up your summer holidays."
www.footvolleyuk.co.uk
To Top
|
