Moya Dodd is goal driven

ADELAIDEAN Moya Dodd fought to play

MOYA Dodd demurs at the suggestion sheÂ’s the most powerful Australian in world football.

“I don’t think of myself as powerful,” she says, before clarifying. “I don’t think of it as power, I think of it as responsibility.”

However Dodd defines it, her CV suggests she has is a fair dollop of both. She is the first Australian on the executive committee of FIFA – the most powerful decision-making body in world football –as well as the first female board member of both the Asian Football Confederation and Football Federation Australia. This comes after a decorated playing career that saw Dodd rise to become vice-captain of the national team and named in the Matildas Australian Team of the Decade for the 1990s.

It a fair effort for a “half Chinese kid growing up in the western suburbs’’ of Adelaide in the 1970s.

In an effort to define her influence, Dodd tells the story of her visit last year to the Iranian capital, Tehran, to speak at a football conference. The Iranian theocracy is not well-disposed to women when it comes to sporting matters. Indeed, Iranian women are banned from attending stadiums to watch matches.

After Dodd tweeted she was heading to Iran to speak, she says she was inundated with requests that she should advocate on behalf of Iranian women who wanted to go to the football.

“I was getting Facebooked and tweeted and emailed by people that I didn’t know,” she says. “People from inside Iran, people from outside Iran, pointing out this state of affairs and asking me to do something about it.”

FIFA president Sepp Blatter was also heading to Iran. For those outside football circles it can be hard to appreciate the pull Blatter has around the world. In essence, he is treated as a head of state wherever he goes. The sporting equivalent of the Pope.

So before the conference started, Dodd pigeonholed Blatter and asked him to raise it with the Iranian government as a priority.

“He nodded and I wasn’t sure if that meant he would or he wouldn’t, but he certainly took on board the thoughts – and sure enough he did,” she says.

And when he did announce that he had asked the Iranian government to reconsider the ban it made headlines worldwide.

“To have the president of FIFA raise an issue with the president of Iran about women’s rights in football was something I was really pleased to be part of. To me that was part of what these positions on FIFA can yield.’’

Dodd’s rise to the top of the world’s most popular game is a remarkable story.

She grew up in Woodville and Semaphore Park with her Australian fireman father and Chinese mother; went to Woodville Primary and Adventist high school Prescott College in Prospect; then to Adelaide University to study law. All the while she was playing football for South Australia and Australia at a time when the women’s game was very much the poor relation to the men’s version.

We meet at a coffee shop on Gouger St and the 48-year-old Dodd approaches in shorts and soccer polo shirt, looking like she could still easily cope with a decent 90-minute shift on the pitch. Indeed, she still plays in an over-35s league.

If you were looking to describe her in cliché form, you could comfortably call Dodd a “pocket dynamo”. There is an effervescence and enthusiasm about her that is infectious and there is absolutely no doubt about her passion for the world game.

Dodd’s love of the game started in her Woodville living room in the 1970s as she watched highlights of games from England. It was a time when there was not a lot of football on Australian TV. In those days, Australia played Australian rules football in winter, cricket and tennis in summer.

There was no national league until 1977 and soccer was still seen as a minority sport played by ethnic communities on the fringes of broader society. What exposure the game had was limited to some long-delayed highlights from England on Channel 7, later the ABC, and reading the results in Monday’s newspaper.

Soccer wasn’t even Dodd’s first love. She remembers kicking the footy with the boys at Woodville Primary at recess – but even then she was worried that the girls were getting a raw deal.

“The boys had the oval (at lunch) on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and the girls had it on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I thought this was outrageous because it was obvious to anyone with basic mathematics that we were getting ripped off.

“The other thing it meant was that I could only play football with the boys at recess. That was 15 minutes of bliss every day and that’s about as far as it got.”

When her parents bought a new television, life changed. She stumbled across the English league highlights and was immediately transfixed.

“I thought, this is fantastic! Where can I do this? Where can I have a go?’’

Dodd has very clear memories of watching her first ever live game of football on TV. It was the 1977 FA Cup Final between Manchester United and Liverpool. The game didn’t start until close to midnight but the 12-year-old pestered her father so she could stay up and watch the match.

“I had no idea what the FA Cup Final was,” she admits now, but that didn’t matter, what was important was it was a game, it was live and she could watch it. United would win the Cup 2-1, but Dodd wasn’t happy. “I though they (Liverpool) deserved to win and I thought it was an outrage that they lost so I became a Liverpool fan.’’

Finding a place that would let a girl play soccer wasn’t easy. At the tail end of the 1970s there weren’t many women’s teams around. Dodd’s recollection is there were only six at the time. The young Dodd scoured the paper for results in an effort to locate a team that was within cycling distance from her home.

By the time she was 13 the family had moved to Semaphore Park and Dodd found a home playing football for Port Adelaide. It was a tough initiation. There were no under-age competitions, so Dodd was pitched into play against adults from the start. She believes it toughened her up.

“You were always the small player and you had to be I guess a bit quicker or think a bit faster to have any hope of beating an older player, so I think that taught me.”

Dodd took to it with a passion. She trained every day, borrowed books from the library on technique and tactics, and watched as much as was available on TV.

She was an attacking midfielder and soon began to stand out. By her late teens she was playing for the state and by 20 she was playing for Australia.

She would eventually leave Adelaide for Sydney in her early 20s to pursue her football career and to develop a career in the law. She wrote her honours thesis on defamation law and nowhere in Australia has more of those lawsuits than Sydney.

Jill Latimer also played for state and national teams and remembers being impressed by her early sightings of Dodd.

When they first crossed paths, Latimer was playing for Dinamo and Dodd by then was with Adelaide University, where she was studying to become a lawyer. The two teams would later merge and Latimer recalls days of tough competition, followed by nights of drinking and merriment.

“She was a very determined player, she had fantastic self-belief in succeeding, very focused and also lots of fun, a really good sense of humour.’’

The Adelaide Uni team was a successful one and Latimer recalls with fondness the fun the team would have on big occasions such as cup finals when a bus would be hired and decorated with banners and streamers to take them to the game.

“In those days, Madonna was at the top of the charts and we used to belt out Madonna songs arriving at the ground and people were horrified we had gone to such lengths. We would have banners screaming out of the windows, razzing the opposition up.’’

Women’s football has made great strides since those days. The number of teams has grown exponentially. Adelaide Uni alone has six teams, the same amount that existed in all of Adelaide when Dodd started playing.

National team the Matildas are now a regular part of Australia’s sporting landscape. The W-League has been running for several seasons and increasing numbers of female players are edging towards making a living playing football.

In Dodd’s day, things were far more basic. The national team generally met at the airport before flying out to tournaments. There were few training camps, with Dodd instead sent her regimen by post and she spent many long days training by herself.

“You went to the letterbox and opened up your letters and followed your training program,” she says.

In 1988, FIFA organised the first official women’s tournament, held in China. At the time, Dodd

was working as a judge’s associate for Justice Michael White and had to find someone to cover her – and then pay $800 for the honour of representing her country.

“We didn’t always have the best possible team because the best possible team may not have been able to either get the money or time off work,” she says.

It was just as well she did play, as she became part of one of the greatest moments in Australian sporting history, coming off the bench to help Australia beat Brazil 1-0 in the tournament’s first round.

Recognising Brazil was a team filled with superior talent, a plan was hatched to soak up all the pressure and trying to hit them on the counter-attack. It worked.

“That showed us magic happens and that anything can happen in football,’’ she says.

Her roommate on that 1988 tour was Carol Vinson, herself a fine attacking player, who says the pair were a bit different to the other Australian players on that tour as they liked to get out and about and explore this new country while other remain glued to the hotel.

“She’s always wanting to learn and experience different cultures,” Vinson says.

Which, by a circuitous route, takes us to FIFA.

FIFA may be the controlling organisation that runs the world’s most popular game but it’s fair to say most fans regard it as endemically corrupt and point to decisions such as the one to give the 2022 World Cup to Qatar as proof that it’s either rotten or incompetent.

However, Vinson believes that Dodd has joined for the right reasons and not just to be a token presence on a body that has been male dominated for more than 100 years.

“Moya isn’t going there just to make up numbers, or to say I’m on FIFA. She’s there to change things and improve the profile of women’s football,’’ Vinson says.

“She really wants the best for women’s football, not only in Australia but around the world.”

Dodd is quite naturally cautious when talking about FIFA. She picks her words with care, without denying any of FIFA’s obvious reputational problems.

“Everyone has got their own view of FIFA,” she says. “There are a lot of good people in the organisation and that means there are a lot of good people to work with to improve the game. I think that the organisation has acknowledged that it is not perfect and has come a good way to addressing those things, including women on the executive committee.”

Dodd was co-opted onto the FIFA executive committee after losing a vote to Burundi candidate Lydia Nsekera for an elected position that would last four years. Many felt Dodd only lost due to internal FIFA politics and was easily the best qualified candidate for the position.

But after she lost the vote in May, Dodd was co-opted to the board and given a year on the 27-member executive committee, where she serves alongside not only Blatter but French legend Michel Platini.

Dodd is kind about the controversial Blatter, who brought her name to global attention before last year’s vote by declaring she was “a good candidate and a good-looking candidate”.

“Of all the things to be famous for 15 minutes for I didn’t think it would be that,” she says with a laugh. “It was a well-intentioned comment which I could take no offence at.”

Outside of her role on the Exco, Dodd is also on the legal committee, the Women’s World Cup organising committee and the women’s committee. She was recently appointed to the International Council for the Arbitration of Sport.

It’s an unbelievably hectic lifestyle, into which she also has to find time to carry on her work as a partner in Sydney law firm Gilbert + Tobin and be a mother to her 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter.

“It’s a juggle,” Dodd admits. “The family is fantastically supportive; the kids are interested in where I’m going and what I’m doing there, so they buy into it too.”

Dodd says it’s a bonus that her partner, Sandy Killick, “also loves football”.

Dodd is vague on what happens after her time on the FIFA exco is up and is unsure if she will run at the next election, although she is determined to remain involved in the organisation.

“It’s great for Australia to be at the table, and it’s great for females in the game that there are three of us at the top table,” she says. “I’ve learnt a lot so far and there is so much to do that I’d like the chance to do more.”

Dodd’s passion is to see as many girls and women playing football as possible. She still sees accessibility to the game – whether that be facilities, teams or even the committee room – as a problem. But she counts as one of her biggest wins her advocacy to lift the ban on wearing the hijab while playing, as it gave millions of Muslim women the chance to play football.

“It’s that challenge of perception, so that every little girl can be a footballer if she wants to. You are not a circus freak or an object of derision for wanting to play the world’s most popular sport. And that’s still a challenge in many parts of the world.”

Closer to home, she wants to make sure that football is as available to girls as it is to boys at all age levels.

Dodd marvels at how far the game has come in Australia, for both males and females, since she first spied this “foreign” game on her TV in Woodville. But she accepts that there is still a lot of work to do to make football this nation’s biggest sport.

“No other code of football has the place for girls and women that our code does,” she says. “It’s played widely by girls now and at the top level you can go to the World Cup and the Olympics. Nobody else offers that.’’