The Matildas are football heritage

Deep inside all of us is an unexplainable urge to be part of something bigger than ourselves. It’s only when that transcendent, once-in-a-lifetime Halley’s comet presents itself in front of you do you realise it.

Sport has that power to unite the people of a nation, across diverse backgrounds and upbringings, up and down the entire political spectrum, from the mountains and valleys to the beaches, across the desert and the rainforests, the CEO in their crisply pressed Armani suit jumping up and down in sheer uncontrollable delirium, RM Williams scuffed and dampened in a messy puddle of beer and chip packets, excitedly grabbing the young retail worker next to them in the stands, an ungainly mess of limbs and emotion, a colourless representation of football heritage.

The Matildas are that unifying force. It’s time to stop fighting it.

It’s time to stop giving air to the tired old tropes of conniving tactics, secrecy and hiding behind a media ban. You might feel you don’t know the Matildas because they haven’t been at the front of public consciousness, but that’s both lazy deflection and categorically untrue.

The Matildas are one of Australia’s highest profile national sporting teams, with a strong lineage and shattering history at major tournaments, each heartbreak more damning and damaging than the last. A 4-3 defeat at the hands of the Americans in the Tokyo Olympics bronze medal match the latest in a long line of tournament anguish.

The Matildas are one of Australia’s highest profile national sporting teams, boasting global stars and household names. You’d be hard pressed to find a person even vaguely familiar with the round ball code in the world who doesn’t know the name Sam Kerr. After all, the Chelsea megastar became the first woman ever to appear on the front cover of EA Sports FIFA video game, for FIFA23. Not just a regional cover either, the global edition. She’s box office.

But look past the Matildas for a second, and you’ll see that this Women’s World Cup has cut through the hardline blind nationalism and anti-footballing sentiment from large swathes of the Australian population to appeal to the innocent little kid in all of us.

The World Cup is proof that Australia isn’t just a nation that loves its own blindly. Australia is a footballing nation, and there’s no hiding from that. What was born 18 years ago via John Aloisi’s left foot at Stadium Australia has manifested, transformed and cultivated into 75,000 passionate and curious football fans packing Sydney’s national stadium for a World Cup quarter final that didn’t even involve the host nation, and those lucky fans were treated to a spectacle as England survived a late Colombia onslaught to advance 2-1 and play Australia in the semis.

The World Cup is proof of the growth of women’s football in this country. Hordes of decked out green and gold psychos on trains, planes and automobiles across all the cities of this land girt by sea. The pubs booked out days in advance, the masses crowded around screens at live sites, even stadiums for OTHER sporting events. The resale site being an unworkable mess, the football fever sweeping the nation as people desperately clamour and refresh their browser, hoping their bandwidth permits them a chance to nab a last ditch ticket to catch the disease firsthand.

Like Mary Fowler skipping through the dangling legs of overstretched defenders, the World Cup has woven its way into the psyche of Australian being. Most social interactions now excitedly commence with “did you catch the game last night?” A basic sentiment, to be sure, and yet one that was so conspicuously absent in years gone past. Where a Matildas game may have been met with a cursory shrug or a “maybe I’ll chuck it on while I’m doing something else” has been completely changed. The foundations of Australian women’s football broken down and built up again, every game now a banner event, a cause to block out the calendar, taking precedence in the national order.

The Matildas are so important moving forward, irrespective of whether they actually go on to win the tournament (dare to dream). People who have never watched a game of football in their lives digging their nails into your arms in tense anticipation, blokey men who wouldn’t dare admit to caring about women’s sport five years ago marvelling at the exploits of Hayley Raso and Caitlin Foord, internet rumour mills spitting out news that Chelsea are interested in Kyra Cooney-Cross (that one is more a personal vendetta, get it done Emma Hayes).

I’ve got family members asking for my Optus Sport login and asking for my thoughts on that latest anti-Australian refereeing decision. The Matildas campaign has created an irresistible whirlpool of pride and interest that is like gold dust, something that has to be carefully panned moving forward to ensure this isn’t a fun little side-trend before fading back into obscurity.

Go on your Instagram stories and scroll through. You’ll see video after video of reaction and wild joyful celebration and phones going flying, in pubs and lounge rooms and even those confined to solitary suffering. It’s a desire to be part of the ride, to share with others, to experience the joy of football.

Women’s football will always have its hardcore backers and lifers, the fighters pushing for funding and coverage, for respect and equality. That will never go away. But the rest of the nation is slowly catching up. The Matildas are worth your time. They’re worth showing on the big screen in Federation Square, they’re worth keeping the SCG open after an AFL game so patrons can congregate.

It’s worth reading their stories. It’s worth learning about Clare Hunt and Mary Fowler, sitting for hours in the car across the countryside, from Grenfell to Cairns, to trials and trainings. It’s worth learning about the story behind Hayley Raso’s ribbons. It’s worth learning about Ellie Carpenter’s battle back from a devastating knee injury.

With every Matildas triumph we climb a little bit higher together, clinging onto their shoulders as they scale this mountain of history with the pressure and the eyes of 25 million in their own backyard.

We admire the resolve to bounce back from a sticky start to the group to put the reigning Olympic champions Canada to the sword 4-0.

We laud the swift professionalism with which they dispatched a dangerous Denmark.

We stand in awe, for 120 terribly nerve-wracking minutes as we watch, through fingers or half-shut eyes, or maybe not even daring to look at all, as the girls go tit for tat with France in a penalty shootout. Taking a sudden death penalty second, after your opponent has scored, is one of the toughest things to do in football mentally, and yet Katrina Gorry, Tameka Yallop and Ellie Carpenter made it look like Thursday night kickabout.

Cortnee Vine, a homegrown talent, plying her trade in the A-League for Sydney FC, who had never taken a penalty in her professional career, stepping up to take the Matildas to a place where no Australian national football team, men’s or women’s, had ever gone before. Buried it with nonchalance.

“I don’t think it’s hit me that, you know, I was the one that stood up for the last penalty kick.”

- Cortnee Vine

There’s just something about Australia at a footballing World Cup. There’s just something about it. Maybe it’s the underdog nature compared to our sneering European counterparts, maybe it’s the sheer, raw tribalism of football, but whatever it is that turns mild-mannered corporates into bloodthirsty rave monsters has utterly engulfed the nation.

The Matildas keep making history, and the entire nation is hitched on the wagon for the ride.