Mary Fowler says ex-teammate once gifted her bananas 🍌 | OneFootball

The Australian forward Mary Fowler, currently at Manchester City, revealed in an autobiographical book that a former Montpellier teammate gave bananas as a gift to her and another Black player during their farewell from the French club.

In the book published this week, entitled “Bloom“, the 22-year-old player talks about her unhappy time at Montpellier (2020-2022), which even led her to consider quitting football.

Fowler joined the club at a very young age (at 17) and, two years later, transferred to Manchester City.

The forward explains that Montpellier organized a farewell party for the players who were leaving that year, but neither she nor her Dutch friend Ashleig Weerden were mentioned by the club.

“Later, when we entered the locker room, some of our teammates asked why we hadn’t received flowers. We shrugged our shoulders, just as puzzled as they were,” Fowler recounts in a passage from the book.

“Some of the girls laughed and soon another player gave us some bananas, saying: ‘Here, take this.’ That was the cherry on top,” the forward revealed.

“Not receiving flowers is one thing, but being two of the only six Black girls on the team, getting bananas was not something I could just ignore. Was it an accident? Was that the only thing in the locker room she could give us? Did she mean well?” she continues.

Fowler says she tried many times “to justify it in different ways, even trying to imagine it could have been an innocent mistake“.

“But when I remember how many times we felt like that at the club, it’s hard to see it as just a simple mistake,” she concluded.

This article was translated into English by Artificial Intelligence. You can read the original version in 🇧🇷 here.