Page - 41 - in Hanadi & Christian - English

5 10 15 20 25 30 35 41 “I know you don’t want to let me play because I’m a girl, but I can play better than most of the boys I know, so I can’t see why I can’t play. I’m going to continue fighting for my right to play football. Im- agine that we decide that you can’t play because you are too short. If we had eleven short players, we would concede a lot of goals from corner kicks. How would you feel about that?” says Hanadi, the oth- er girl who wants to play. “Well, we’ll see how we can solve this problem. Right now, what we have to do is train hard because Chema has already signed us up for the borough league and we want to be ready for the first match. If we train hard and practice a lot, we will see who the better players are.” says Kevin. Episode 8: Losing a Match We have trained hard all winter, sometimes all together, sometimes each group by themselves. The local league has worked out fine and we’ve had great fun. Finally, the day has come. This morning we all were very enthusiastic about playing our first game in the borough league, but we were thrashed. I think we played quite well, but it seems we are not a team yet. “We lost because the girls played for too long.” says Juan Carlos. “I don’t agree. We lost because we only had forwards and no- body wanted to stay back in defense. It’s not about three girls play- ing on the team.” Bochdan answers. “I’m very sorry you lost the match. You’ve played better than other days but you’ve been a bit unlucky.” Chema tries to get our spirits up. “I don’t think it’s a matter of bad luck, that’s not why we lost. I think we haven’t trained together enough.” says Kevin. “We all still play on our own, individually. If we train more often, maybe we won’t be such a bad team.” “I think Bochdan is right. We all wanted to score but nobody worried about the other team scoring.” says Hanadi. “And it’s a