Alanna Kennedy is crouched on her heels, her head down, face buried in her hands.
The yellow Olympic jersey she wears is soaked in sweat, her socks streaked with grass and dirt.
As the full-time whistle lingered like a bad dream in the humid Marseille night, the Matildas centre-back could do nothing but collapse into the grass and burst into tears.
She hardly looked up to catch the devastation of her team-mates, trying to block out the world with her green-tipped fingers. Her shoulders caved in as she tried desperately to stifle the sobs that heaved through her chest, betraying to the world just how much this moment meant.
She wants nothing more than for the pitch to swallow her up, to shield her from the noise she knows is about to erupt around her after Australia’s earliest exit from the Olympics in 24 years.
She had done all she could, all that was asked of her. Across the three group-stage games against Germany, Zambia, and the USA, she’d had perhaps one of her best ever major tournaments, with last-ditch tackles and goal-scoring moments of her own to savour.
But it wasn’t enough. For this entire team, who’d played their hearts and lungs and legs out, nothing they did at the Paris Olympics was enough.
After a few minutes, Kennedy wipes the hot tears from her cheeks and stands up. She knows she needs to face it now. They all do.
How drastically things have changed for this team in just 12 months.
At exactly this time last year, the Matildas went into their third group game against Canada at their home World Cup — a game that they needed to win to keep their tournament hopes alive — and emerged 4-0 winners.
Today, they went into a match against the USA with the stakes just as high, but came out the other side flattened. Not only that, but it was Canada who had the last laugh, winning their final group game against Colombia to shoot up the table and sweep the Matildas out the door in the process.
Those two performances from Australia, just a year apart, stand in stark contrast from each other. Against Canada in Melbourne, the team played with fire and fight, throwing themselves forward in overpowering waves of coordinated attack even if it left them exposed, refusing to accept defeat.
Against the USA on Thursday, they were the opposite: defensively solid but frightened, overly cautious when venturing forward, looking lost when they got there, tempting fate by not playing to win but simply trying not to lose.
As valiant as their defensive efforts were, and as justified as an attempt to eke out a 0-0 draw may have been, where was the trust in themselves that we saw in that Canada game? Where was the bitter refusal to do the safest, tamest thing? Where was that so-called “never say die” spirit?
The unquantifiable thing that gave the Matildas their spark a year ago has been missing this Olympics. Even the 6-5 win against Zambia was not so much a comeback fuelled by spirit as it was by panic; desperate to avoid the humiliation of a loss to the tournament’s lowest-ranked team after shipping five calamitous goals.
Kennedy almost snatched them from death’s jaws on Thursday, clawing a goal back in the 91st minute before missing an equaliser a minute later. Did she have flashbacks to that missed penalty against Brazil that bundled Australia out of Rio 2016? Does anyone ever forget these things?
It’s a well-worn saying that attack wins games while defence wins championships, but sadly the Matildas had neither in France. They conceded the second-most goals across the group stage (10), and aside from their six-goal burst against Zambia, scored just once more, today, when the game was almost out of reach anyway.
In a perfect encapsulation of all that, the fact that Kennedy ended this Olympics as the team’s joint-top goal scorer alongside fellow defender Steph Catley with two apiece says everything about the team’s toothlessness in the areas where they needed bite most.
The Matildas’ “never say die” motto might fit neatly in a hashtag, but after yet another tournament where progress has relied on do-or-die moments, and now seeing them succumb to it, one begins to wonder why they seem to find themselves on death’s door so often, particularly enough that their dramatic escapes have become part of their folklore and identity.
Is that what big football nations do? Is that how they think? Is that how we want to be? Is this all we can be?
That last one is perhaps the hardest question to answer, but it is one that this Olympic campaign can shed light on. While much has been made of the Matildas’ fourth-placed finishes at their last two major tournaments (Tokyo 2021 and last year’s World Cup), they did, by all accounts and metrics and comparisons, over-perform.
In the first instance, they did so thanks to the generational talent of Sam Kerr, who almost single-handedly dragged Australia to the semifinals. In the second, the immeasurable boost of a home crowd, coupled with key players in top form, helped push them to the same stage.
But the Matildas had neither of those this time around in Paris. What they had, instead, was the burden of their own recent history and the bloated expectation of a nation newly-acquainted with them.
When you take a paint stripper to the emotions of this side, the country ranked 12th in the world came into a 12-team tournament and finished 9th. They came in with a squad missing its best goal-scorer, with its key players either injured or under-prepared, and lacking the same squad depth as other teams. That’s a result around about what anyone should expect.
And yet Australia wakes up today devastated that the Matildas have not exceeded every cold, hard number and metric that we’d usually use to assess other teams’ chances. The love and support that has blossomed over the past 18 months for this team can act as a sail, billowing them forward, but it can also act as an anchor, sinking them down under its weight.
It is important to keep context in mind here. Germany and the USA are giants of women’s football, both having won multiple major tournaments across generations of players.
In juxtaposition to the Matildas’ World Cup run, their performances last year were blips on their otherwise outstanding records, not single moments to hold aloft and pretend are the new normal.
Indeed, that Australia lost to two teams who had the energy and style and bravery that Australia has lacked for some time is perhaps telling of where the Matildas are at in their life-cycle: still experiencing the hang-over of a home World Cup, and now beginning the painful transition out of one generation and into another.
Both Germany and the USA are useful mirrors in which the Matildas can see a version of their future.
Coming off major tournament wins in 2016 (Germany gold medal) and 2019 (USA World Cup title), each team went into a process of rebuilding. It was hard and slow and ugly, but ultimately necessary. They cycled through coaches and countless players, but one by one, put the new pieces in place.
Now, at least in the case of the USA, with a bright new coach leading a bright young crop, they look as lethal as they did when they last lifted a major trophy four years ago.
So where does this leave the Matildas? Well, in the shortest term, Tony Gustavsson’s tenure is almost certainly over. He oversaw a period of immense change for the team, shepherding them through two Olympic Games and a home World Cup, and helped write the narrative that got the nation to fall in love with this team.
But this campaign in Paris has exposed him. Against Germany, he was tactically outmanoeuvred. Against Zambia, he got swept up in the chaos instead of controlling it. And against the USA, he bunkered in when he perhaps should have gone in all guns blazing.
Maybe he will reflect back on those decisions and wish he’d gone about them differently. Maybe he won’t. Regardless, he can be proud of having helped rocket this team to national superstardom, which is something no coach before him had done. There is gratitude from all of us for that.
But in the longer term, the challenges are far greater. The Matildas’ talent pool has been slightly expanded under Gustavsson’s watch, but not by much.
The domestic pipeline for developing national team players, the A-League Women, continues to struggle for investment and competitiveness, while our best upcoming stars are escaping overseas in search of full-time football.
Our women’s youth national teams are middling, particularly when competing in Asia, and there are few players under the age of 23 who can reasonably put their hand up for senior selection at this stage given the gulf in speed and quality.
Several senior players are on the cusp of retirement, leaving a gap that needs to be urgently filled before Australia host the Women’s Asian Cup in 2026. Lydia Williams, Clare Polkinghorne, Katrina Gorry, Tameka Yallop, and Michelle Heyman will all likely walk out the Matildas’ door, taking with them hundreds of caps and decades’ worth of experience.
Who is ready to step into their shoes?
And who will be the coach that ushers them through? Most of the biggest names on the international coaching scene have already been snapped up, while the coaches at domestic club level arguably need more global exposure before taking over a team like this.
It does, in some way, feel like the end of something. For Gustavsson, for the team, for the Australian game. The past four years have been an exhilarating journey, watching the Matildas step out of the shadows and into the sun of the country’s adoration.
But now the rest of the world is leering back in, casting an even longer shadow across our faults, reminding us that we cannot linger in the light of the past for long lest we become blinded by it.
As Kennedy stands up and makes her way across the pitch, her red-raw eyes don’t really register the hands she’s shaking, the faces she’s passing.
In the circle that Tony Gustavsson gathers up, she barely listens to what’s being said. She and all her team-mates are looking down into the grass, or over the shoulder of their coach, lost somewhere in the distance of their thoughts.
Paris felt like the Matildas’ first realistic shot at an Olympic medal.
After this group-stage exit, it also feels like their last.
ABC News Australia
