Chanelle was six months old when I took her to the awards night in Wellington.” Wendy Sharpe with daughter, Chanelle, on the sideline. “I got the New Zealand player’s player of the year that year. All the players accepted that’s what I had to do, and it was fine,” Sharpe recalls. “I was still breastfeeding, so Mum came to the games as my nanny, and I’d come off at halftime, top the baby up and run back on again. It meant she missed being part of that World Cup, but quickly returned to her best – playing in the national tournament three months after daughter Chanelle was born. She was unknowingly pregnant with her first child when she scored eight goals to help New Zealand win the Oceania Women’s Nations Cup, and qualify for the inaugural FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991. I was raw, I had a big ticker, I’d run all day, and I’d score goals,” she says.Ī double international – she also played touch for New Zealand – Sharpe was a trailblazer in another sense. “I wasn’t gifted with really good football skills, so I had to fight hard to keep my place in the team. Sharpe still holds the best scoring rate for a Football Fern (with over 10 caps) at 0.7 goals a game.īut she admits she was never a very skilled or technical footballer – growing up playing rugby in all-boys teams before she was introduced to soccer at 15. Her swag of 34 international goals stood as the highest by a New Zealand woman until 2012, when it was surpassed by Amber Hearn (who scored 54 times in 125 games). She was an absolute scoring weapon for the Football Ferns – and still holds records almost 30 years after her last international.
Sharpe admits she had to battle to earn those caps, too. I played these games and they are still on my personal tally.” Wendy Sharpe before her 50th game for the Football Ferns (in a shirt she had to return). “Officially it’s documented these caps have been taken off us. “I know I earned 50 caps – our games were few and far between, so it took me 16 years to get them, where it would take four years today. “I’m still not happy about it,” Sharpe says.
Other Football Ferns playing at that time also had alterations to their cap tallies (some of those games were against Taiwan B and Hawaii). Records show she made 53 appearances for her country, but around the turn of the millennium, six of those games were taken from her tally of internationals because they weren’t official FIFA-sanctioned games. * Football Fern Michele Cox and the miracle medalīut there’s a bit of contention around just how many caps Sharpe has to her name. She also has a blazer, a goblet and a cap presented to her on playing 50 games for New Zealand – becoming the second Football Fern, behind her friend and team-mate Maureen Jacobson, to reach the milestone. She had to return the kit she wore in her last game, also against the Matildas, in 1995. “And some of those games we played in the men’s kit.”īut at home in Katikati, Sharpe has the shirt she wore as a naïve 16-year-old in her debut against Australia in 1980. “In those days, we had to give a lot of the shirts back afterwards,” she says. It’s not like she’s given away any of the uniform she wore in her 53 appearances. Wendy Sharpe owns a small handful of New Zealand playing shirts that represent a Football Ferns career spanning 16 years. A trailblazing mum-athlete, the double international is passing on her rich football wisdom to a new generation. Football Ferns legend Wendy Sharpe still holds scoring records set three decades ago.
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