Flying to the rescue - again

Vonnie Eteaki Jknatto is everything to the Hekari 'Boys', from trainer and disciplinarian to pastor and courier.

Vonnie Eteaki Jknatto, the Hekari United manageress relaxes, briefly, at the Park Rotana hotel in Abu Dhabi yesterday.

Superwoman wakes every morning at 4.45am. She requires no alarm.

By 5.30am, she and her fathomless energy reach the training ground for Hekari United FC in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea, organising the 6am session. She works that session until 8am, when she and three helpers ensure that breakfast fortifies the 25 Hekari players inhabiting a four-bedroom house.

By 8.30am, the schoolteacher from the Solomon Islands home-schools her 12-year-old daughter until 3pm, save for a 30-minute break to check on team lunch. Players call her "Mums." She calls them "Son" or "The Boys".

"Manageress," the club calls Vonnie Eteaki Jknatto when sending rosters to the Oceania Football Confederation, but that is only because a standard page lacks the size to list counsellor, spiritual adviser, co-owner, personnel manager, co-business manager, equipment manager, disciplinarian, head chef, driver, sometime pastor (when her husband, owner John Kapi Natto, is on business), conduit to physicians, That Rare Woman Who Sits On The Team Bench During Football Matches and, OK, human courier.

"Human courier" came up just lately as the Oceania Champions League title-holders prepared to travel toward Abu Dhabi for the Club World Cup, which will begin tomorrow with Hekari playing Al Wahda.

Hekari needed proper football boots; the nearest proper football boots would be in Fiji.

The human courier flew the six-hours-and-then-some to Fiji, procured the boots, ensured proper sizes and returned fewer than 48 hours later. That is separate from glove runs when, she says: "I have to take my goalkeepers to the shop."

As Andrew Lepani, the captain, put it: "She plays a big role in everything we do." As he also put it: "She means a lot to us." And as he also put it: "Why should she not be on the pitch?"

There she is in the dressing room before matches, joining the coaches and team for prayer and final words, in her case always: "Believe in yourself."

There she was on the pitch embracing players in palpably emotional scenes from Auckland last May, when the six-year-old, semiprofessional Hekari finished surpassing New Zealand's Waitakere United to clinch passage to Abu Dhabi.

In fact, the indefatigable former member of the Solomon Islands national netball team graces Oceania pitches enough that she has received flak for it … zero times.

"It's the other way around," said Seamus Martin, Hekari's team administrator for the Club World Cup. "It's Vonnie giving the men a hard time."

So from 3pm to 4pm, Superwoman naps. (Phew.) From 4pm to 6pm the schedule reboots with a training session and the colossal cooking for about 30 - rice, fish, greens, sweet potatoes, bananas - at two vibrant tables.

"For me, after a week, I was exhausted," said Martin, who just signed on from the Oceania Football Confederation to aid Hekari.

From dinner, she shepherds players for any medical attention. Through the evening could come a Christian service or a hundred possibilities from being "24 hours on call for everything".

On and on it goes, and some players from villages or faraway islands even have resided with the Nattos as teenagers including, she said, "my skipper" and "my striker" and "one of my goalkeepers".

"I think that the players, we are very, very close," she said yesterday in the lobby of Hekari's hotel.

"Sometimes I deal with them individually because I know how they feel, especially when they're away from their wives, their children, their parents," as are those from Fiji (three) and Solomon Islands (two). "Sometimes it's hard being a mother and seeing them."

Sometimes, just thinking of her 15-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son away at school in the United States: "I have to hide away and shed tears," Superwoman said.

All the while, she said: "I'm very tough in my discipline. Very, very tough. It's good for them and it's good for football."

If the coaches wonder about acquiring a player, she demurs if she deems his character insufficient. Said Martin: "Players have come and gone because they didn't meet the standard."

She helps sort player "allowances," she said, as a semi-professional club does not do contracts. And - shhh, whispering here - sometimes "The Chief," as the players call Mr Natto, goes a notch soft on the players at, say, shopping malls, so Superwoman intervenes and sets boundaries.

So if Hekari United happens to beat Al Wahda, do think of Papua New Guinea's government ministers, for these leaders of a rugby-mad nation will hear from Superwoman about funding for football, as she reminds that Hekari train on a "gravel field".

And as this discussion figures to precede midnight, when Superwoman tends to sleep at last, those ministers really won't stand a chance.