Posts Tagged ‘Soccer’
a world turned….
Australia knocks Denmark out of the World Cup – time for a hug
Often, in my usually brief discussions with women on the concept of a ‘bonobo humanity’, I get, first of all, ‘What are bonobos?’, and second, ‘But we’re not bonobos’, and third, ‘This female [boss/politician/influencer] was a disaster’. So, in this post, I want to write about this third response.
A thought experiment. Men are banned from running for political office of any kind, and also from voting. And, somehow the world’s richest people – say the top twenty, are all women (though they may not all be multi-billionaires – it just might be a more sharing human society). In other words, forget about female x or y who’s reached the top in an essentially patriarchal society. Think more about a world in which care and concern, and collaboration, and yes a bit more of lovey-dovey sex, has become the norm, and men are mostly happy about not having to make all (or any of) the decisions.
Okay, perhaps that’s going a bit far, but if you consider that the bonobo world is in some ways an inversion of the chimp world, then it might be worth considering what would be an inversion of the current human world, horrendously complex though it obviously is. And for me the obvious transformation would involve gendered power relations.
Do I see it happening? Not globally, of course, but human society is both highly fragmented and yet more inter-connected, technology-wise, than ever before. The Scandinavian countries, observed from my distance, which is about as far away as one can get, seem the most likely pioneers of this New Order, with Sweden, the Netherlands and Denmark ranking as the least machismo nations by some August Body or other (what’s the female version of machismo? – apparently we’re still working on it), but there are any number of nations vying for the title of most patriarchal.
Perhaps we need to look at what the ingredients need to be, to bake a female-dominated society. One ingredient would surely be female solidarity. Here’s a nice solidarity statement that says all the right things:
Women supporting women is a powerful concept that helps foster success and empowerment. Women are more successful in all facets of life when they support one another. Building a community or a tribe of supportive women boosts morale and creates opportunities for growth and collaboration that lead to a more harmonious and inspiring environment. Mutual support among women is essential for overcoming cultural and systemic hurdles, promoting gender equality, and providing a sense of companionship, healing, and encouragement.
Read this and think bonobos. Don’t worry so much about ‘gender equality’ – genders are no more equal than people are. Just think about how female gender support can create a generally better environment for all, humans and non-humans alike, and as we think more on this, and as the evidence grows that female, as opposed to male, empowerment generally leads to more group ‘companionship, healing and encouragement’, without reducing our ability to innovate and problem-solve, female leadership might just become the order of the human planet, with the assent, if at times grudging, of cantankerous males.
So, when you think of female leaders you consider to be ‘disastrous’, or simply not much chop, think of all the male leaders, particularly in what we broadly term ‘politics’. Have there been any female Genghis Khans? (the Mongol invasions have been estimated to have killed nearly 40 million – but who was counting?). How about Mao Zedongs? (whose ‘Great Leap Forward’ in 1958-62 led to the deaths of some 45 million of his own countrywomen, and men – someone has been calculating), or Adolf Hitlers? (whose war-mongering and racism resulted in 15 to 20 million deaths in Europe), or Joe Stalins? (the numbers for him are hard to calculate as they include deaths from forced collectivisation as well as mass executions, gulag neglect, and more or less avoidable famines). Then there was Leo Victor, aka Leopold II of Belgium, whose atrocities in the ‘Congo Free State’ as it was grotesquely named at the time, have left a legacy from which the region has never recovered, as recent extreme crimes and punishments have shown.
Would female leaders have been just as bad, as even some females are prepared to argue? Well, I would point to bonobos as compared to rather more murderous chimps – but we’re not bonobos, are we?
So the point is not to become bonobos but to note that women are in general less violent than men, more co-operative, and – well they have other features that are more attractive than men, just as bonobos, in their social behaviour, have features that are more attractive than chimps. I’ve written about women’s soccer as an example. Opposing teams in the women’s game can be tough and testy with each other – I’ve seen it – but I’ve never seen anything like the bad behaviour I’ve observed in the men’s game, while group hugs in the women’s game are much more frequent and demonstrative. It’s just something in women’s nature – or is it socialisation, it’s hard to pick it all apart. The point is to utilise these better natures, however begotten, for a better world.
And yes, we can learn from bonobos!
References
https://modernminds.com.au/journal/latest/women-for-women-why-do-we-need-our-tribe-to-grow
a century’s creeping progress towards a bonobo humanity? – 1: this unsporting life
Having read, in Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own, about women and football, of all things, to the effect that women were no more allowed to play football (meaning soccer) than they were allowed to obtain a decent education, and given that Woolf’s lectures are almost a century old, it might be interesting to note the differences in women’s opportunities, and achievements, in sport but also in science, academia, business and politics, in the WEIRD world in particular (since that’s also my world), over the past 100 years or so.
Soccer first – my favourite sport. By the 1920s it was very much international (the first World Cup was in 1930, but soccer was an official Olympic sport from 1920), but of course the idea of women playing it at a serious level was barely conceivable. Fifty years on, in the 70s, it was a different story. At the beginning of that decade the first unofficial women’s world cup tournament was held in Italy, but it took another 25 years for FIFA to stage the first official tourney. The most recent one was held in 2023 here in Australia, and New Zealand, and was hailed as the biggest and best yet. Women’s soccer clearly has a bright future, though it’s very much worth noting that the total prize money pool for the 2018 FIFA World Cup was $400 million, compared to that for the women in 2019, a ‘mere’ $30 million. Of course these are eye-watering figures, but there’s obviously no excuse for awarding the men 13 times more than the women. I don’t have figures for the most recent tournaments (2022 and 2023), but I suspect the gap has narrowed a bit more, given how vocal a lot of female players and officials have been about the matter.
The one obvious sport, to me, in which women have had, historically, as much of a profile, or almost as much, as men, is tennis. Which raises a question which came to me even in my early youth – why are women’s professional tennis matches best of three sets when men’s are best of five? Does it have to do with women’s physical stamina being measurable at three compared to men’s five? Is the women’s marathon distance measured at three fifths that of men? Of course, the answer is the obvious one – women were traditionally considered to have less stamina, along with all their other limitations vis-à-vis men. But then there’s this:
From 1891 to 1901, women played best-of-five matches in the finals of the US National Championships, the predecessor for what is now known as the US Open. A lot of those finals went to five sets, but the United States National Lawn Tennis Association Council reduced the format to best-of-three sets, thinking five sets would be too strenuous a task for women.
The same site points out that this is a good excuse for awarding less prize money to women than to men, but currently the prize money for the Australian open is equal for men and women, as has been the case since 2001. Wimbledon and the French Open have had equal prize-money only since 2007, but the US Open was by a long way the first, in 1973.
So if equal pay is now the standard in elite tennis, what about equal work? It’s easy to see that in making big tournaments best of three for women, tournament organisers (and they’re apparently to blame for maintaining this format, not the players) have made a rod for women’s backs. Their excuse, apparently, is that having best of five matches for women too would be a scheduling nightmare. Just not enough hours in the day… So why not make the men’s matches best of three as well? Problem sorted? Ummm. Presumably they’ve found, or assumed, that the men’s games are a bigger drawcard, and better suited to longer, gladiatorial-style combat? It’s, mucho macho, a puzzlement.
Okay so what about golf, another internationally-watched sport with oodles of thrills and spills, and skills-per-gender equally celebrated. I won’t go into mixed play just as I haven’t mentioned mixed doubles in tennis, but of course it’s worth mentioning that in both sports the equipment used differs along gender lines, though there is individual variation too. Women in general have less upper-body strength and will tend to use lighter clubs (though with racquets there are likely complex aerodynamics involved which I won’t explore).
I’ve found a useful article, ‘How big is golf’s gender pay gap?’ on a golfing website (linked below) which unfortunately is undated (a constant source of irritation for me), but the mention of ‘the Rio Olympics this year’ dates it to 2020. Here’s a quote:
Golf has been a slow mover in the gender equality stakes, as only a year and a half ago, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews issued their first women’s memberships. As the home of golf, St Andrews are to lead by example. But what example does it set for the next generation? And the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable, as our research shows professional male golfers can expect to earn 83% more in winnings this year than the next winner on the female tour. They play the same game, to the same level, the only difference is one chromosome, yet their trophies and achievements are worth less.
It’s a bit confusing – does it mean St Andrews should lead by example? It’s something of a personal issue for me as my mother’s family are from Fife and my brother was born in St Andrews, and I was born just across the Tay, in Dundee. Anyhoo, to claim that ‘the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable’ makes no sense. And the rest of this short article doesn’t provide any answers, or confidence in the future. It does point out that equal pay for women, in standard employment, has been achieved in many countries (though equal pay is only a part of the battle given that women alone are the child-bearers, and need to have employment scenarios that can accommodate this), so why such disparities in elite sport? The only answer I can think of is patriarchal tradition. As with may other ‘sports of kings’, golfing history is rooted in sexism (and racism). The US Masters is played every year at Augusta, Georgia, where women were first allowed to become members in 2012. The first section of a female tournament played on the Augusta course was in 2019! So much for the self-proclaimed land of freedom and opportunity. But then, Georgia is so far from New York that to call that country ‘the United States’ is a bit of a joke, at least to us outsiders.
So that’s enough of sport, or the ‘fun’ side of life, for now. I’ll look at other aspects of inequality – and matriarchal improvements – in future posts.
References
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/08/masters-tradition-is-rooted-racism-sexism/
soccer bonoboism leads the way
I’m writing this on the day that Australia plays England in the FIFA Women’s World Cup semi-final, and I’ve been a soccer aficionado, and mediocre player, from my earliest youth, when no such competition for women existed. In fact the women’s game had a rather messy start internationally in the 1970s, when many countries first ‘permitted’ women to play the game. The first fully-fledged FIFA World Cup was held in 1991, and the women’s game has caught on rapidly since then, with soccer now registering as the most popular sport for women in this country. The current competition, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, was being judged the most successful in its brief history before even the halfway point was reached.
All of this is intrinsically interesting to me of course, but it also allows me to expatiate once more on female-male differences and the advantages of a female-dominated WEIRD future.
But before continuing, I’d like to reflect on the ‘WEIRD’ acronym. I adopted it some time ago without giving it too much thought, as a semi-useful term encountered in my readings, somewhat synonymous with the terms ‘Western’ and ‘First World’ (as opposed to ‘Third World’, but I’ve no idea what happened to the Second one). None of these terms really fit, and as for WEIRD, ‘western’ seems meaningless in global terms, ‘educated’ depends on the type of education being posited, but literacy and numeracy would be included, and a modicum of scientific knowledge, and some analytic skills. ‘Industrial’ now quite likely refers to more or less post-industrial societies such as Australia, and ‘democratic’ might even include such quasi-democracies as the USA. Yet the term does have some value, as long as you don’t scrutinise it too closely, and its currency influenced me to buy and, so far, learn much from Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest people in the world, an exploration of the generally more individualist, non-clan, non-lineage based world it refers to, and its recent history of success. So that’s my excuse.
So the first point I would make re women’s soccer compared to the men’s game, is an elaboration of an earlier point I’ve made about women hugging and men shaking hands when meeting or parting. This is on a spectrum of course but there’s no doubt that women are more often huggers and men shakers. The World Cup is of course the most high-stakes soccer tournament there is, so the competition is especially fierce, with every game after the group stage being ‘winner take all’. And very few players will get to play in such a tournament twice, so losing isn’t a viable option. It’s been remarked on more than once how often the winners in this year’s tournament have huddled together with the losers, comforting and supporting them in their despair. Of course it’s only a game and all, but it’s just an addition to the multifarious examples of women supporting women, in matters great and small. Not that the games themselves aren’t fiercely competitive, with fouls aplenty, but generally without the biffo that sometimes spoils the male game, both on the field and among the supporters.
I also note that the game has helped to normalise female-female sexual relations, as one might expect in a microcosm in which females dominate – a bonobo humanity, so to speak. Of course, it’s a tiny-teeny microcosm, but it’s growing, and it’s getting more attention worldwide. All of this is a good, for more than just soccer.
Australia lost its semi-final, but let’s embrace the cliché, soccer, and female empowerment, is the winner.
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
three things: IQ and longevity, the Taliban and Americans, the real World Cup
Nerissa: …. superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer
The Merchant of Venice, Act 1 , scene 2
Thing one
I don’t know what my IQ is, having never knowingly sat a test, but I assume it’s a number just short of infinity. So it was interesting to read, in Carl Zimmer’s book on genetics, She has her mother’s laugh, that IQ is highly correlated to longevity. Not that there’s a genetic link, at least not directly, but it stands to reason. The higher your IQ, the quicker it takes for you to ‘get’ things. This was more or less confirmed by a simple, ingenious brain processing test. Subjects were shown simple shapes flashing very briefly on a computer screen – two vertical lines spaced apart with a horizontal line sitting on top. The participants had to guess which of the two vertical lines was the longest each time. Researchers had worked out that if the images were flashed too briefly, the participants just resorted to guesswork. It required approximately 0.1 seconds for people, on average, to perceive the shape correctly. The key, though, lay in the variation of that perception. It ranged from 0.02 seconds to 0.136 seconds, and researchers found a pretty reliable correlation between accurate perception time and intelligence (presumably measured by IQ – Zimmer doesn’t say). Unfortunately it’s not quite reliable enough, apparently, for us to do away with those pesky, long-winded IQ tests and replace them snappy shape tests, but as mentioned, it does seem to confirm the intuition that intelligence has to do with sharpness and quick-wittedness. Which brings me back to longevity. Some work done in Scotland, which has turned out to be accidentally longitudinal, provides interesting evidence. In 1932 the Scottish government conducted a massive testing program of nearly 90,000 eleven-year-old students – just about the whole of the country’s kids of that age. They were all given a 71-question exam involving decoding, analogising and arithmetic among other things. Over time this ‘experiment’, or what you will, was forgotten, but the records were unearthed in 1997, and then researchers tried to get in touch, some 65 years later, with the ‘kids’ who’d been tested. They managed to gather together 101 elderly citizens in an Aberdeen hall to resit the gruelling test. They found that the score on the original test was a pretty good indicator – 73% – of the score second time around. But there was another interesting finding – the percentage of the test-takers who had scored well and were still alive in 1997 was considerably higher than those who’d scored poorly. Some 70% of the women in the top quarter of scores were still alive, compared to 45% in the bottom quarter:
Children who scored higher, in other words, tended to live longer. Each extra 15 IQ points, researchers have since found, translates into a 24% drop in the risk of death.
Carl Zimmer, She has her mother’s laugh, p296
Why is this so? Smarter people generally know what to do, and are quicker to learn what to do, to live longer, to make more, financially and otherwise, of the circumstances they find themselves in, to be safer, healthier and the like. Stands to reason.
Thing two
A huge fuss is being made of allegations, probably true, of Putin offering and paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. My first reaction to this news was – surely the fervently anti-American and anti-western Taliban were already hell-bent on killing infidel foreigners, and many of the purest ideologues among them would be insulted by the offer of bribes to do so? Then again, many of them would’ve been laughing up their ample sleeves at the thought of being paid by the Russkies, whom they likely consider only slightly less odious and infidelious than the Yanks, to do what they were already heaven-bent on doing. For this reason, it would surely be impossible to prove that any deaths of Americans, or their coalition partners – including Australians – at the hands of the Taliban, could be sheeted home to Putin and his fellow thugs. Even if money traced to Russia appeared in Taliban bank accounts after some atrocity or other, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the atrocity would’ve occurred in any case. Win-win for the Taliban.
Thing 3
The announcement that the real World Cup will take place in Australia and New Zealand in 2023 makes life a little more bearable, though it’s three years away and I’m not getting any younger. This competition combines two of the most life-affirming enities in life, for me at least – women and soccer. Hopefully we’ll have learned many lessons from Covid-19 by then haha, and at least some of today’s thuggish political leaders will have been placed where they can do no more harm, and we can get on with the more exciting stuff of life, like having fun.
VAR horrors: World Cup 2019
Canto: It might be surprising to know that besides our many supertalents we’re sports aficionados, and of course experts, but in order not to overwhelm our fan we’ve decided to limit that interest, largely, to one sport, soccer, which we’ve never spelt f-o-o-t-b-a-l-l. Hope that doesn’t offend.
Jacinta: Well I’m happy to offend, so I strongly advocate calling this year’s comp, and those following in 2023, 2027 etc, the World Cup, and that other comp shall henceforth be called the men’s world cup.
Canto: Probably won’t catch on until the world’s turned upside down.
Jacinta: The world’s a ball, dummy, there’s no up.
Canto: The human world’s more like a pyramid, and we’re pretty close to the base…
Jacinta: Is that Trump’s base?
Canto: …which is why we can’t afford to watch all the games – as if we had the time – as they’re not being shown free-to-air. But apart from the full Australian games we can see the (very brief) highlights and follow the commentary and the controversies. Which brings us to the VAR (video assistant referee), which has been introduced for the first time ever…
Jacinta: Except in the men’s game, which isn’t real soccer…
Canto: For the first time ever, at any level, in this World Cup.
Jacinta: So the VAR isn’t actually a video, it’s a person, or team of people, watching and evaluating a video – including the on-field ref. And according to ever-reliable Wikipedia, they review all refereeing decisions under four categories:
- Goal/no goal – attacking team offences, ball out of play, ball entering goal, offences and encroachment during penalty kicks
- Penalty/no penalty – attacking team offences, ball out of play, location of offence, incorrect awarding, offence not penalised
- Direct red card – denial of obvious goal-scoring opportunity, serious foul play, violent conduct/biting/spitting, using offensive/insulting/abusive language or gestures
- Mistaken identity in awarding a red or yellow card
If the VAR makes a decision overturning that of the on-field ref, which is only in the case of a COE (clear and obvious error) she has the option of conducting an OFR (on-field review), using a video screen, clearly visible to all, in the RRA (referee review area). The problem is, I’ve noticed that the VAR is picking up more stuff than the field referees have done – or could have done – in the past, so it’s already changing the character of the game.
Canto: Good or bad?
Jacinta: I’m not sure. Let’s discuss some examples. Take this one. In the game against Brazil, Australia’s Tamika Yallop went down in the penalty area after a clash with a Brazilian defender, as she was heading towards goal with the ball. A shout went up, and of course the VAR had to adjudicate on the basis of penalty/no penalty. As part of this process, we the audience get to see, in slow motion, what the VAR has seen (which is perhaps a dangerous thing, if only for our blood pressure). The commentators – who I think were biased for Australia – seemed to agree that it was a definite penalty, but what the video clearly revealed was that, moments before the incident, as Yallop was surging into the penalty area, the ball bounced up, hit her on the arm and bounced off kindly for the Australian. It was because of this handball, not seen originally by the ref, probably because the Brazilian was tightly marking her, that the penalty issue didn’t need further consideration. A free kick was awarded to Brazil. But if there was no VAR in operation, that handball wouldn’t have been picked up, and the penalty would likely have been awarded – with no complaints.
Canto: Actually I think some Brazilian players did see the handball and tried to draw the ref’s attention to it, but you’re right, if neither the field or line ref saw it directly, they wouldn’t have ruled on it, and Australia might have gone on and scored. But don’t you think it’s a good thing that the VAR picked it up?
Jacinta: Errr… let’s go on to the next example. Now as you know, I have dual loyalties, being a dual citizen of the UK and Australia. I was born in Scotland and brought up with some Scots traditions, and was mildly excited to find Scotland in this World Cup series, I think for the first time. So imagine my shock when, after hearing (I could only listen on the radio, like an old-timer) that Scotland had gone 3-0 up against Argentina and were very likely to qualify for the round of 16 after losing their first two matches against England and Japan. But then, Argentina came surging back with two goals in the second half. Even a narrow win gave Scotland a chance, but then, at 3-2, and <em>in the last minute of time added on</em> – the 94th effing minute – Argentina were awarded a penalty.!!</p>
Jacinta: Errr… let’s go on to the next example. Now as you know, I have dual loyalties, being a dual citizen of the UK and Australia. I was born in Scotland and brought up with some Scots traditions, and was mildly excited to find Scotland in this World Cup series, I think for the first time. So imagine my shock when, after hearing (I could only listen on the radio, like an old-timer) that Scotland had gone 3-0 up against Argentina and were very likely to qualify for the round of 16 after losing their first two matches against England and Japan. But then, Argentina came surging back with two goals in the second half. Even a narrow win gave Scotland a chance, but then, at 3-2, and in the last minute of time added on – the 94th effing minute – Argentina were awarded a penalty.!!
Canto: Quelle horreur! Was it a fair decision?
Jacinta: Fuck knows… Sorry, feeling a bit emotional. I was listening to it on the effing radio! I only saw it on the highlights the next day, and by that time I was too depressed to care. But that’s not the end of the drama. Argentina took the penalty, and Lee Alexander, our goalie, saved it! Frabjous Day! But then, she was ruled as having come off her line by a nanosecond! And get this – not only do the players have to get used to the beady eye of the VAR, but a new rule was brought in on June 1 – a week before the World Cup – which ‘means that goalkeepers must have one foot at least partly on the goalline when the kick is taken and can neither stand behind or in front of the line’ – and I quote the words of the obviously neutral sports journalist, John Irish. That means that goalies have to adjust their approach to penalty kicks after a career of doing otherwise – a week before the biggest event of their lives!!! But I haven’t finished the story. The penalty was retaken – and this time Argentina scored, but according to the commentators, players were encroaching on the penalty area before the spot-kick was taken!!! Please note above – Goal/no goal ‘encroachment during penalty kicks’. And the ref didn’t even consult VAR about it!!!
Canto: Okay, calm down. You must surely admit that the Scots stuffed it up, just a bit, to get into their parlous position, dropping from 3-0 to 3-2 in quick time. And did you see these players encroaching?
Jacinta: Well, no, I was far too emotional to be forensic about it. But you know what foreigners are like – they’re all bloody cheats. It’s an effing conspiracy I’m telling you. Of course they want Argentina over Scotland in the finals, it’s good for business!!! They probably think they’ll get a chance to play Messi!!!
Canto: Well you don’t need to worry about that – he’s only a male.
Jacinta: Oh yes I forgot. Anyway, I’m not sure if we’ve heard the worst of the VAR. My worry is about the flow of the game, which, if VAR is extended – which I expect it will be – to other parts of the game, in a micromanaging sort of way, it will become overly stop-start and technical. but maybe that’s the future… Then, in order to comply with VAR, we’ll replace humans with androids…
heroes of another kind: the Matildas
It might surprise some people to learn that I’m a bit of a sports tragic, though I follow sport in general a lot less than I did as a kid. Nowadays it’s a more or less guilty pleasure as I always feel, when watching a soccer game, that I should be spending my time getting my head around cosmology, electronics, molecular biology or anything else that doesn’t come easily to me.
I say soccer – and that’s what I’ve always called it – because that’s almost all that I follow nowadays, though cricket, tennis, Aussie rules (not to be called AFL), golf, hockey, table tennis and even basketball, were all sports that I played, with extremely varied proficiency, as a youngster. And as a female supremacist, I’ve gone over to the bright side in recent years, and if I were to choose a sporting team to follow out of the many and varied, it would be the Matildas, our national women’s soccer team. And I’m only one of many jumping on the Matildas bandwagon at present. Their most recent home match, against Brazil in Newcastle, drew a record home crowd of nearly 17,000, remarkable for a Tuesday. Their previous record was set only a few days before, against Brazil again in Sydney, when 15,000 attended, just pipping the crowd for the GWS v West Coast Eagles AFL semi-final, a real indication of the rise of women’s soccer here, and it may it go on rising.
So, a little history. The first national women’s team competed in the Asian Women’s Championship in 1975 (the first ever held). Of course it was all pretty amateur in those early days and playing opportunities were sporadic for all women’s soccer teams. It’s fascinating that there was an FA ban on women’s football in place until 1971, according to Wikipedia (I think they’re talking about Britain, but in most places there wouldn’t have been any need for a ban, it just weren’t ladylike en it?). The first women’s world cup was held in 1991, and Australia made its first appearance in 1995, but lost all three of their group games, including a 5-0 loss to Denmark. Throughout the nineties, the Matildas (the name was adopted in’95) were unheralded and unpaid, and even resorted to posing for a nude calendar in 1999 to raise funds. The 2000 Sydney Olympics raised their profile, with large crowds attending their games for the first time, though their results were disappointing. A bit of a lull followed, though they managed to qualify for the 2003 world cup, and reached the quarter-finals in the 2004 Olympics. Gradually they were becoming recognised internationally. In 2007 they reached the quarter-finals of the world cup for the first time, and in 2010 they won their first international championship, the Asian Women’s Championship, now called the AFC Women’s Asian Cup. At the 2011 world cup they again reached the quarter-finals – and again in 2015. Earlier this year they defeated the USA for the first time in their history (after 27 attempts!). This has been their most striking year, with their victory in the inaugural tournament of nations, including a dominant 6-1 defeat of Brazil. As of September 1, the Matildas are ranked 6th in the world, though recent victories may have promoted them further. In any case it’s a ranking the men’s team could only dream of.
Australia has a national women’s soccer league, the W-league, which comprises nine teams, but many of our top players also play overseas – in Japan and the US in particular. Current players Lisa de Vanna and Clare Polkinghorne have been capped over 100 times for Australia, but the national side has generally managed to combine youthfulness with experience – for example defender Steph Catley already has 62 caps at age 23, Alanna Kennedy (defender) has 57 caps at age 22, Caitlin Foord (midfielder) has 58 caps at age 22, Emily van Egmond (midfielder) has 66 caps at age 24, and Katrina Gorry (midfielder) has 58 caps at age 25 (and those figures are already out of date). This extraordinary combo augurs well for the team’s future.
It’s probably fair to say, though, that Australia’s young star striker, Samantha Kerr, is garnering most of the plaudits at the moment. First capped for Australia at the age of fifteen, she became the all-time leading goalscorer in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) of the United States earlier this year, though she’s only just turned 24. Many of her goals have been spectacular – she’s a great header of the ball, and she certainly has the striker’s killer instinct. She also has great positional skills and her reading of the game and her assists are a joy to watch.
So it’s likely that the Matildas’ phenomenal recent success will continue for a while yet, and it’s quite plausible to see their ranking rise to the very top. The next world cup is in France in less than two years. Unless something disastrous happens in the intervening period, which is highly unlikely, Australia will start as one of the favourites, for the first time. Can’t wait!
super-striker Sam Kerr