Kaylin Swart: from World Cup to day-job and long bus journeys on game day

South Africa keeper on the contrast between playing in the global showpiece and at home, in a non-professional league

Only three weeks after Kaylin Swart and her national teammates flew from Wellington to Sydney, as the first South African senior side to compete in the knockout rounds of a World Cup, she was on a bus, traveling four and a half hours north of Johannesburg to Limpopo, to play a league match on the same day as the drive.

“It’s wild,” she tells the Guardian. “I tell people I am a full-time worker and a part-time footballer. A lot of us have to take unpaid leave to play matches. But come game day you would never say we are not full-time players.”

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