Trust Your Spark - A chirpy pathbreaker in football boots

A foreign language, cold weather and bigger European opponents have not deterred Tan

- Rohit Brijnath

On a sunlit afternoon comes love at first shout.

"Are you Danelle?" The kid is nine, he's wandering by at The Boys' Brigade campus, his name is Tristan and he knows his football. Danelle Tan is a 19-year-old, 1.7m pathbreaker in colourful boots, the first female Singaporean footballer to play in a European league, and the kid is besotted.

Will you sign my hand? It's only the start. He asks me for paper and wants that autographed, too. Then he disappears, only to return with another kid, boots, a glove, a shin guard.

Can she also sign his other arm? You don't want to tell him the scribble will wash off, but what she's doing won't. She's a writer of indelible history, venturing into Europe, kicking down Singaporean stereotypes of size and gender and scoring 16 goals in 27 games for Borussia Dortmund's now-fourth division amateur women's team. With every dribble through a foreign land she's carving a road for the next Singaporean kid with an outsized dream.

Tan, who has a chirpy coating of confidence, arrived only the night before but is eager for a workout.

She can't stop because she's come too far. She can't stop because she isn't yet a professional, paid footballer and so her expedition must continue. She can't stop because there's a saying she heard once which she holds close like a sporting prayer: "Don't stop when you're tired. Stop when you're finished." Toughness in sport isn't muscle and it isn't a stare. Toughness is a quiet, gritty equanimity on desolate days. Toughness is trusting you have the skill to endure. This toughness lives in Tan, it's there in her bones, in her story and in the advice she gives.

"Play boys." It is, she'll tell you, "the fastest way you can improve". It's getting "thrown out of your comfort zone".