Olivia Chance will be key for the Football Ferns against Switzerland in Dunedin. Photo / Getty Images
When Football Ferns midfielder Olivia Chance flew home for the World Cup, she was accompanied by some very precious cargo.
As well as her boots, some training kit and a couple of books, her pet dog Gooner also made the long trip back to New Zealand.
Chance, who plays for Celtic in the Scottish Premier league, left Glasgow in June, arriving for the second part of the Ferns’ pre-tournament training camp in Auckland.
Bringing your canine companion back for a World Cup is unusual, but Chance, who will be key for the Ferns against Switzerland in Dunedin on Sunday (7pm), had a special reason.
“My partner and I are getting married,” Chance tells the Weekend Herald. “My partner is from Melbourne so we are getting married here in January. And - you’re gonna think I’m crazy – but I wanted him [Gooner] at the wedding.”
Chance has lived a nomadic life for more than a decade, playing for clubs in England (Everton, Sheffield United, Bristol City), Scotland (Celtic), Iceland (Breiðablik) and Australia (Brisbane Roar), after a four-year scholarship at the University of South Florida.
She’s not ready to move home just yet but wants her dog to have a more settled environment.
“At some point we’re going to also move back closer to this side of the world so I thought, ‘Well, if he’s already over here, then it’s easier to move when we need to’,” says Chance. “He is loving New Zealand. He’s a rescue dog and they’re so cute. He suffered a bad life before. But he’s a traveller. We flew him from America after college to England, and now he’s flown to New Zealand. But we’re not going to make him travel too much more anymore.”
Chance and her fiance Robert acquired their dog almost a decade ago, when she was studying in the United States.
“He was left in a house and the ASPCA found him and took him to a shelter,” said Chance. “My partner Rob found him and he has been ours ever since. I love him. He’s got separation anxiety, but they all kind of have issues after whatever they’ve experienced. So we just deal with that. So my parents can deal with that for the next six months. My family have another dog - I wouldn’t say they’re best friends yet but it’s a work in progress.”
But why “Gooner”?
“It’s my fiance’s team,” explains the 29-year-old. “He supports Arsenal. But I don’t support Arsenal. So the poor thing, his name is Gooner.”
A recent study by worldwide players union FIFPro found that Chance was the most travelled footballer – male or female – on the globe – racking up 145,406km across 12 trips between August 2022 and the end of March last year for club and country commitments.
“I have become a better sleeper in planes,” laughs Chance. “That’s for sure.”
That is what has made this World Cup so special, with the unique opportunity to spend an extended period in New Zealand.
“It’s been unbelievable to be home and to have so much support, to feel it and it see it,” admits Chance.
Chance is one of the leaders in this Ferns squad, captaining her country on several occasions across 46 appearances, but it has been a long road.
She made her debut in 2011 as a teenager but it wasn’t an enjoyable start.
“I was quite young (17) and most of the team was a lot older than me,” said Chance. “It was quite a hard tour and I didn’t really fit in or didn’t know where I fitted into their style of play. They played a lot more physical and I was one of those players that wanted the ball at my feet. They didn’t really know where to place me and it’s hard when new players come in and people can feel threatened. It wasn’t till I came back [in 2016], I was older, more mature and more comfortable and confident to be myself.”
That experience has made Chance cognisant of the need to help the next generation on their own journeys.
“A lot of the girls started calling me their mum,” laughs Chance. “I mix well and I try to look after the team. I want the young players to get as comfortable as quickly as possible because it will benefit the team. We’ve got great players coming through and it’s about giving them confidence to take those opportunities in training and know that we’re backing each other and that will flow into the game.”
Heading into this tournament Chance was on the fringes, after a knee injury picked up against Iceland in April.
She didn’t start in the two warm-up games against Vietnam and Italy and was on the bench at Eden Park and in Wellington. But she impressed as a second-half substitute in the capital with her vision and passing range, and appeals as a likely starter for Sunday’s critical match.
“She showed how influential she can be,” Ferns coach Jitka Klimkova said after the Philippines match. “She’s an experienced player. She showed how good she can be.”
The Wellington result was painful but the team have regrouped.
“It was a sore one for us to take, very hard to deal with,” says Chance. “But it is all about Sunday now and the team is very focused on that. We obviously want to win but it’s the process and how we get there that’s important. If we stick to the game plan we know we can break them down.”
Michael Burgess has been a sports journalist since 2005, winning several national awards and covering Olympics, Fifa World Cups and America’s Cup campaigns. A football aficionado, Burgess will never forget the noise that greeted Rory Fallon’s goal against Bahrain in Wellington in 2009.