Dear Singapore, <\/p>\n
Yesterday, I saw a girl playing football at a park near my house. It was late, the kind of hour when dinner plates are cleared and day turns to night.<\/p>\n
She was alone under floodlights, just her and a football, with her bicycle parked neatly by the park. She wasn\u2019t doing anything fancy \u2014 just touches, turns, juggling. Focused. Steady. No phone, no coach, no noise. The quiet rhythm of practice.<\/p>\n
I stood there for a while, not to intrude, but because she reminded me of someone I used to know. Me.<\/p>\n
On weekdays after school. On Saturday mornings. And the times I had to spare. Sometimes my brother would join me. But oftentimes it was just me and a football \u2014 and a big, audacious dream.<\/p>\n
You wouldn\u2019t have looked twice at me then. A small, tan-skinned child on an empty pitch. No spectacle. No spotlight. Just one girl believing she could do something that hadn\u2019t quite been done yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dear Singapore, Yesterday, I saw a girl playing football at a park near my house. It was late,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[563],"tags":[64,63,31243,596,85],"class_list":["post-51488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-football","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-cna-insider","tag-football","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}