Magic , livre ebook

I am because we are.
To God first and foremost.
And to my family, Banyana Banyana, and my extended football circle.
To all the people who inspired me to follow my dream and supported me.
– DESIREE ELLIS , April 2023

MAGIC
DESIREE ELLIS : From Salt River to the 2023 World Cup
An authorised biography
Luke Alfred
MACMILLAN

First published in 2023
by Pan Macmillan South Africa
Private Bag X19
Northlands
2116
Johannesburg
South Africa
www.panmacmillan.co.za
ISBN 978-1-77010-874-5
eISBN 978-1-77010-875-2
In the text © Desiree Ellis 2023
In the foreword © Vera Pauw 2023
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
Every attempt has been made to ensure the accuracy of the details, facts, names, places and events mentioned in these pages, but the publisher and author welcome any feedback, comments and/or corrections on the content.
Photographs courtesy of the Ellis family and BackpagePix.
Editing by Alison Lowry
Proofreading by Sean Fraser
Design and typesetting by Triple M Design, Johannesburg
Cover design by publicide
Desiree Ellis and mural cover photographs by Lauren Mulligan

Contents
Foreword
1 ‘She was so tiny she fitted into a shoe-box’
2 The weird story of Athlone-something (and a really bad case of mistaken identity )
3 A long-distance crush
4 Football family Ellis
5 Ah, those girls from Natal
6 The post-Celtic years
7 ‘No one in Atlantis is allowed to go hungry’
8 ‘We don’t recognise you, who are you again?’
9 Small steps to Sweden
10 The late 1990s : Pain, heartbreak and more pain
11 The ‘Tovey Theory’, and Desiree’s 2002 swansong
12 Work to live? Live to work?
13 Vera Pauw : Her role in Desiree’s journey
14 Egyptian beginnings, and divine intervention in Bulawayo
15 2018, the biggest of big years
16 Yellow brick road to France? More like potholes on Jan Smuts Avenue
17 ‘A most extraordinary half of football’
18 Lockdown dead ahead
19 2021 : Getting past Covid-19 and building a team
20 The penalty that caused all the fuss
21 ‘The longest nine minutes of all of our lives’
22 Reflecting on six beautifully challenging years
23 Letting your hair down the Desiree way
Acknowledgements


Foreword
W hen I was asked to write the foreword for a book on Desiree’s journey, I immediately said ‘yes’. It is a huge honour to try to put onto paper what Desiree means for women’s football in South Africa, in Africa and in the world, but also what Desiree means for the development of girls and women in South Africa in general.
I met Desiree when I started as the national coach of Banyana Banyana back in 2014. ‘Who will you bring as an assistant?’ was one of the questions asked during my talk with the management of the South African Football Association (SAFA). ‘I want the best female coach in the country as my assistant,’ I replied, ‘because continuity in development is crucial. When I eventually leave South Africa I would like my assistant to take over.’ And so it happened. Desiree was appointed as my assistant and, without knowing each other, we stepped into the unknown.
We worked for two-and-a-half years on a very intense but very successful project. Our first highlight was qualifying for the Rio Olympic Games 2016 by giving Equatorial Guinea their first home defeat in history. The technical staff will never forget how we planned this win! The project in general, and the way we were playing at the Rio Olympics specifically, opened the eyes of people in the world of women’s football, and with that opened doors for many players. The result of all this is that young South African girls now know they can create their own future.
In those two-and-a-half years, Desiree and I became close friends, and I have experienced that Desiree is unconditionally faithful to those who are faithful to her. We support each other in the challenges in our journey. Neither one of us forgets where we come from. If anyone was ready for the job when I left South Africa after the Rio Olympics, Desiree was. SAFA kept its word and appointed her as head coach. With that, SAFA made the next step in planning their success in women’s football! It was a crucial decision to create continuity.
And what a journey Desiree has been on. She introduced her own style and her own path. She has been in charge now for seven years. She won the Confederation of Southern African Football Association’s (Cosafa) Cup first and, from that moment, Banyana Banyana kept on the winning path. She has qualified twice for the International Federation of Association Football’s (FIFA) World Cup (in 2019 and 2023) and her most recent and most proud moment was winning the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (Wafcon) in Morocco in 2022. To get there, Banyana Banyana had to beat the traditional African powerhouse, Nigeria. With these achievements, she deservedly won the Confederation of African Football (CAF) Coach of the Year in 2018, 2019 and 2022.
To my mind, it is unbelievable that Desiree wasn’t nominated for FIFA’s Best Coach of the Year in 2022 after winning the most difficult championship, Wafcon, while the coaches of the European and South American champions were nominated. With respect to their performances, it is a glaring omission that Desiree did not receive just recognition for her stellar performance in Africa.
This is the best example I know of why the FIFA ranking system does not work for African countries, players and coaches. The FIFA ranking system keeps African performances under the radar. I am so proud of Desiree. I wish her only the best and the recognition she deserves. This book tells you where she has come from and shows you the path she has taken.
Let me finish by expressing a wish for the future. How good would it be if Desiree can now prepare her successor so that women’s football in South Africa grows to even greater heights? South Africa has the potential to become a powerhouse in women’s football under Desiree and under her eventual successor. She has walked a remarkable journey.
Vera Pauw
Nieuwleusen, the Netherlands
March 2023


1

‘She was so tiny she fitted into a shoe-box’
‘Desiree was born two months premature at three pounds 11 ounces [1.6 kg]. She spent the first five months of her life in an incubator at the Cape Peninsula Maternity Hospital in District Six, a hospital that no longer exists. She was so tiny she fitted into a shoe-box.’ – Natalie Ellis
O pen any map of Salt River in Cape Town’s eastern suburbs and your eye is immediately drawn to Salt River Circle. Four roads radiate off the circle – Durham Avenue, Salt River Road, Albert Road and Voortrekker Road – each street name providing a summary of the main geographical, social and political currents in the suburb’s history.
Salt River, for example, is the river that once ran off the lower slopes of Devil’s Peak before making its way to Table Bay; Voortrekker Road gestures to the trekboers who headed from the Cape into the hinterland in 1838 in search of unknown freedoms and the unblemished word of God; while Albert (the eastward extension of which is called Malta Road) refers to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Prince Albert was Queen Victoria’s first cousin, and, strange as it may sound today, he was the man she chose to marry in the grandest of society weddings in February 1840.
Running off Albert Road at right angles close to the circle is Westminster Road and there’s a street behind that, running at a slight diagonal to Albert this time, called Junction Road. Westminster and Junction are joined by Greef, a road that has great meaning in the Ellis family because Susan Ellis, Desiree Ellis’s late paternal grandmother, lived at house number 36 on Greef Street.
Susan played an important role in Desiree’s early development. Because both of Desiree’s parents worked, Susan fulfilled the duties of a caretaker parent to their children. Desiree’s dad, Ernest, was employed for 18 years as a typewriter technician at Northern Office Equipment in Cape Town’s central business district, while her mother Natalie worked as a dressmaker and seamstress in the Salt River and Woodstock textile factories after leaving school. ‘Auntie Susan’ provided informal aftercare for not only Desiree, who was born on14 March 1963, but Erna, born two years later, and Carmelita, born the year after that.
Ernest and Natalie’s fourth daughter, Bertina, was born in 1970 and she, too, was taken care of by Auntie Susan. Like her three older sisters, she went to Dryden Street Primary School around the corner from Greef Street, but the children were often dropped off at Auntie Susan’s well before they were of an age to go to school because there was no one to care for them at home with both Ernest and Natalie at work during the day.
Desiree was a worry to her parents when she was a baby. She was born two months prematurely and spent the first few months of her life in an incubator in the hospital.
Ernest and Natalie loved her to bits – she was their first child – but in the beginning it wasn’t certain that she would develop properly and be able to lead a normal life. Natalie used to knit and crochet her tiny clothes and sometimes during daily afternoon visits to the hospital she was allowed to put her hands into the incubator and change Desiree’s nappy (or ‘kimmy throw’, as