The 2023 Women’s World Cup semi-final gripped Australia in a way that few sporting events have. The Rise of the Matildas: Inside the Women’s World Cup Campaign highlights the astonishing impact of one team’s determination to leave the game in a better place. Photo: Supplied.
Everyone who helps make the wheels of the women’s football world turn needs to be acknowledged because without them a history, and a contribution, could not be created. Antiquity should never be forgotten.
Such is the claim by Fiona Crawford, one of Australia’s most respected women’s football writers, and an adjunct lecturer at the Queensland University of Technology’s Centre for Justice.
It is important that a history be preserved not only for efficiency and productivity, but also as a permanent record that can be kept from generation to generation. Written annals give us a sense of the past through an eyewitness account with emotion, thoughts, ideas, and feelings during an event. Ultimately, records management is the best way to guarantee chronology with historical, fiscal, and legal impact is accurately identified and preserved.
Few sporting events have gripped Australia in the way the 2023 Women’s World Cup semi-final did. It was metamorphic on any level! What the Matildas, and the organisers, achieved was equivalent to game-changing concepts.
Elation gripped Australians, in particular, as the Matildas set out on the ‘’euphoric’’ road to the 2024 Paris Olympics. To register that path, Crawford draws on interviews with players, administrators, sponsors and fans, ranging from Mackenzie Arnold and Bruce McAvaney to Annika Wells and Annabel Crabb, competently unpicking questions of gender, human rights, race and women’s sports.
As the author of The Matilda Effect and co-author of Never Say Die: The Hundred-Year Overnight Success of Australian Women’s Football, puts it: “They gained a competitive advantage and forever changed the sport.
“From the longest penalty shootout in World Cup history to the most-watched television event since Australian records began, the 2023 Women’s World Cup was as transformative as it was gripping,” Crawford writes.
“Across the tournament and beyond, each match, each match result and even viewership eclipsed the previous, with sell-out crowd being surpassed by sell-out crowd, and sold-out jerseys demonstrating clamouring, unabating feverish goodwill and interest. It was the tournament’s ninth official iteration, but its sophistication and impact leapfrogged that innocuous single digit. By its end, it would record firsts beyond the ones that had long been touted.
“… Indeed, through its prodigious lighthouse efforts that comprehensively fulfilled the tournament aspiration of going ‘beyond greatness’, the team not only reshaped how women’s sport can be done but left an indelible imprint on football and the wider sporting, social and cultural landscape.”
While such significant impacts were made by the Matildas and the Women’s World Cup, we are still very much in the early stages of understanding that influence. We have not yet woven the conjointly and separately important fragments into a coherent, depth-filled narrative as so much has happened, with such intensity and across so many planes and platforms.
Crawford continues to make some significant points. We need to learn from and build on the transformative events of, and the ‘’Matilda Effect’’ stemming from, July and August 2023.
“That’s relevant not just because the stories are enthralling as we seek, against bleak world events, escapism and something to celebrate, but because we know from past experience that women’s stories are not traditionally valued; their history is often not well preserved. We also know that without documenting or analysing said stories, we can’t learn from or build on them.
“So, this book is a bid to document a small segment of the ephemeral details – some big, some small, some comprehensive, some fragmented and fleeting, all contributing to the bricolage of history – of the what and when and who and how of that sport- and society-shifting time before they disappear into the ether or are consolidated through the accordion of memory. It’s one person’s humble effort to lay down a broad-brush foundation that will hopefully soon be built on by many others.”
The Rise of the Matildas highlights the astonishing impact of one team’s determination to leave the game in a better place. They are now unequivocally Australia’s most beloved national team. The Matildas’ “never say die” motto augers well, reflecting their relentless and committed approach to the game.
Crawford’s chronicle is far greater than just “an initial, imperfect attempt to write what should not be forgotten”.
The Rise of the Matildas: Inside the Women’s World Cup Campaign, by Fiona Crawford, Melbourne University Press, $34.99
