"JOHANNESBURG - South Africa's female football team will be coached in etiquette and given tighter T-shirts in a drive to soften their image and attract sponsorship ahead of a 2007 World Cup bid. A top women's football official said on Wednesday that female players who dressed and acted like men were giving women's football a bad name and needed to nurture their feminine side by wearing more shapely kit and sitting like ladies. "They need to learn how to be ladies," Ria Ledwaba, head of the women's committee at the South African Football Association told Reuters. "At the moment you sometimes can't tell if they're men or women."

　　　The national team would be given a more shapely kit to emphasise their femininity on the pitch and would swap dowdy track suits for skirts and jackets when travelling. "Obviously they can't wear skirts on pitch... but they will be given outfits made for women, with female shirts that are shaped for breasts," Ledwaba said. SAFA would also hold etiquette workshops to turn the players -- often plucked from the streets of South Africa's sprawling townships with no schooling -- into "national assets".

　　"We need to teach them etiquette and the importance of being a role model," said Ledwaba. "There are mothers out there who won't let their daughters play football because they think they'll start acting like boys."