The first time Emily van Egmond played football for Australia, nobody bothered counting the number of people watching. It was a friendly against North Korea at Ballymore in 2010, and although the national team midfielder reckons there were “maybe a couple of thousand” people in attendance, nobody knows for sure because, after all, who really cared? These were fringe players in a fringe team in a fringe sport. Stores were not selling out of replica Matildas jerseys because there were no replica Matildas jerseys. Australia won 3-2 and a national holiday was not declared.
Indeed it was relatively recently that many of the women now preparing to face England in the biggest football game seen on Australian soil were working second jobs to supplement their tiny retainer contracts. Caitlin Foord drove an Uber around Wollongong. Katrina Gorry helped out at a school. Alanna Kennedy worked in Pizza Hut. The idea of playing in front of millions had not yet occurred to them, let alone being blazoned on billboards and buses across the country.
And so when Australia and England step out at Stadium Australia on Wednesday to play their World Cup semi-final it will be a vaguely concussive moment for many of the players involved, a time for sharp intakes of breath, a time to feel just a little overwhelmed. From the Olympic Park to the outback, Australia will grind to a halt for a little over two hours. Pub quizzes, theatre shows and even grassroots football games have been cancelled in anticipation. The Australian men’s basketball team have rescheduled an international against Brazil so they can watch.
How we reached this point is a question with both a long and a short answer. The short answer is that in just a few weeks the Matildas have written their own irresistible narrative arc, coming to the brink of a humiliating group-stage elimination before that purifying, cathartic 4-0 victory against Canada. Their penalty shootout win against France on Saturday night held entire town squares and Qantas planes in its grip. A radio station doing a live commentary of the Australian rules football match between Carlton and Melbourne ended up ignoring their game entirely to react to events on the screen in Sydney.
And of course Australians love nothing more than a winning Australian team in any sport they can find. But more specifically they seem to love this team, love the bravery and commitment these women display under the utmost pressure, love the way they advocate and represent and never fail to speak their minds. Taxi drivers offer entirely unbidden opinions on Mary Fowler. Politicians clamber over each other to attach themselves to the Matildas’ success. The former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce posted a Facebook picture of him watching the France game in the pub. Only later did users point out that the screen was showing a different game entirely.
The television broadcast of the quarter-final on Saturday was by an audience of 4.9 million, more people than watched the Queen’s funeral last year. The England game will almost certainly surpass that. Indeed it may even rival the biggest sporting moment on Australian television, an event with which this World Cup team have frequently been compared: the Olympic 400m gold medal won by Cathy Freeman in the very same stadium in 2000.
Freeman’s triumph was a genuinely if fleetingly unifying moment in the country’s recent history. The powerful symbolism of an Indigenous Australian woman becoming the focal point of a nation’s adoration, and waving both flags in victory, felt like a point of healing and reconciliation, even if it arguably changed very little in the long run. Similarly this team with its rich and varied heritage – Sam Kerr comes from an Australian Indian family, Fowler’s mother was born in Papua New Guinea, Kyah Simon and Lydia Williams are both First Nations Australians – has been held up as a marker of progress and diversity. And yet here too it is worth asking whether these can be any more than markers or symbols, whether anything tangible can be achieved beyond making Australians feel better about themselves for a month.
Because the longer story here is not one of a shared national journey, but of success wrought largely out of sight and against overwhelming odds. For decades football has been chronically underfunded in comparison to more popular sports such as Australian rules football, rugby league and rugby union, a fact probably inseparable from its higher rates of participation amongst girls and immigrant communities. Many local clubs lack separate female changing facilities or separate girls’ kit. The majority of players in the professional A-League competition still work second jobs. Only two of the 23-woman Australia squad play their football domestically. It is only in addressing areas such as these – rather than the public holiday that the prime minister, Anthony Albanese has promised – that Australia’s World Cup can enjoy a lasting legacy.
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None of which, in an ideal world, should be contingent on a Matildas victory. But of course it probably is, and so in order to claim their rightful inheritance Australia will need to overcome their oldest sporting enemy of all.
England, the European champions, have grimaced and tiptoed a path through the tournament, overcoming a nervy start and a penalty shootout against Nigeria on their way to this semi-final. Along the way the famously intransigent Sarina Wiegman has been forced to tweak her tactics several times as a result of injury or suspension. But they have a gathering momentum and big-game experience, and have fully embraced their villain status in this Ashes semi-final. “When you can quieten the crowd,” the midfielder Keira Walsh says, “it is a very nice feeling.”
France’s coach, Hervé Renard, declared that his side had “played a quarter-final against an entire nation”. England will encounter a similar experience on Wednesday: a team of women playing for something larger than themselves, for those who went before them and those who will come after and those present now, taking their seats in sitting rooms and social clubs all across Australia, every single one of them desperate to be counted.
