Valarie Nekesa: This Is How It Feels To Score Kenya’s First Ever FIFA World Cup Goal

_{Valarie Nekesa (jersey 13) during Kenya versus Mexico clash at Felix Sanchez Olympic Stadium in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic on October 24,2024. PHOTO/FKF}

SANTO DOMINGO, Dominican Republic -Every player’s dream is to contest at the highest pinnacle of their sporting category.

But what adds the lather on this level is the ability to score goals, smash records and re-write histories.

This is what happened to Kenya on a hot, humid Thursday night in far away land, the Dominican Republic when the country’s U17 women’s football team, the Junior Starlets, wrote history at the Felix Sanchez Olympic Stadium in Santo Domingo.

In the boisterous night, cheered on by a capacity crowd that included even the Dominican Republic natives, Kenya got a first FIFA World Cup goal, the country won a first FIFA World Cup match and the nation ended the global football extravaganza ranked third overall in Group C on three solid points.

But who who engineered the whole process?

Valarie Nekesa!That name will be remembered for a very long time, it will be forever etched on Kenyans minds.

In the night, Nekesa went into the annal books as the first Kenyan to ever score in a FIFA World Cup match,  and how does she feel about it?

“I’m truly overwhelmed. I feel over the moon. It’s such a great feeling, but first I have to thank God for it,” she underlined.

“I’m more than happy to have scored that goal. First, we badly needed to find the back of the net, then we did. Secondly, we badly needed the points, then we got the three of them. Lastly, we badly needed a respectable ranking, then we ranked third in the pool, we left the tournament with heads held high,” she stated.

Nekesa reveals that she badly wanted to score a goal in the World Cup and now she is happy that the dream came to pass, and she will forever be grateful to left back Joan Ogola who despite being in a position to either score or waste the chance, opted to give her a clean pass which she slotted in without any difficulty.

“I’m now inspired to work even more harder, I’m now motivated to score even more goals that will take Kenya to other global competitions like these,” Nekesa said.

Despite being on the score sheet, Nekesa is quick to state that Kenya won the match, not because of her magical goal, but as a result of team work.

“It was our unity, our purpose on the pitch that lessened the burden on the field, so we were able to score,” she said.

” In our first two games of the tournament, we were so much engulfed in fear and this took out our potential to score. It was fear that resulted into our defeats.

“But against Mexico, we said kaende kaende (tackle it as it comes), we put fear aside and activated our free mode, we played it according to how creative we could be and we are happy with the results,” she said.

“We stretched, gave our best, kept the possession to our favour so we had undue advantage over our opponents, resulting into the victory.”

Nekesa is happy that they were able to finally make their fans, who stayed in the wee hours of the morning to watch them play, happy after the two disappointing outcomes against England and Mexico.

“Had we gathered this kind of courage in our earlier matches in the tournament, we could have probably sailed into the quart finals, but we live to fight another day,” Nekesa concluded.

UTILITIES 

Quarterfinals 

Saturday 

Nigeria vs USA- 10:30pm

North Korea vs Poland- 2am

Sunday

Spain vs Ecuador- 10:30pm

Japan vs England- 2am