THE STRIKER AND THE CLOCK

A former professional soccer player shares her memories of the game.

During her career, Cloepfil once told one of her younger siblings what she considered the greatest feeling in the world: “scoring a goal.” Throughout her career as a striker, that opinion didn’t change, despite the many injuries she had to endure and the challenges she faced as a woman athlete. This book is Cloepfil’s tribute to the game she loves and a memoir of her decade of competition. The author moves back and forth in time, chronicling her soccer-obsessed Oregon childhood as a daughter of supportive parents who were athletes in their own rights—her mother was a state champion sprinter, her father “captained his perpetually winless high school football team”; years in which she “played in six countries, on four different continents: Australia, Sweden, Korea, Lithuania, United States, Norway”; and the sexism she and other women athletes had to contend with, from the dismissive attitude toward women’s sports to the fact that, in Australia, women played for free, whereas male players in the same division earned over $1,000 per week. The text consists of 90 short chapters, most of them only a page or two, each one named for a minute of play, plus a chapter in the middle titled “Halftime.” Their terseness robs the narrative of depth and prevents it from venturing beyond the anecdotal. Fortunately, most of the anecdotes are amusing and informative, and, like many soccer devotees, Cloepfil gets winningly philosophical about the game—e.g., when she notes that a match’s duration is “a temporal perimeter of an hour and a half” or states, “The beginning of the game, like the beginning of a life, is bloated with possibility.”

A poetic, heartfelt tribute to the beautiful game.