Only four countries have won a Women’s World Cup; Australia, for now, will not be one of them. In soccer, the semifinal can be the cruellest match. On Wednesday night, in Sydney, the Matildas, as the Australian women’s team are known, played in their first World Cup semifinal, against England, and fell, at home, with one goal and two mistakes, just short of their first final.
Losing a World Cup semifinal is supposed to be England’s thing. (There’s a line in “Three Lions,” the country’s unofficial soccer anthem, about it.) For roughly half of this match, England, the current European champions, and Australia, the competition co-hosts, were roughly even. In the sixty-third minute, Australia’s captain, Sam Kerr, one of the world’s most devastating strikers, dribbled for forty yards, then half chipped, half blasted the ball thirty yards, into the English goal. Then England scored two more.
None of the teams in this year’s semifinals—England, Spain, Sweden, and Australia—has won the trophy before, but it was not a surprise to see this Australian team in the final four. The Matildas have consistently been among women’s soccer’s top teams; squad members play for clubs such as Arsenal, Real Madrid, Manchester City, and Chelsea. (Without Kerr, who was injured for much of the tournament, the winger Caitlin Foord, who plays for Arsenal, had been one of the Cup’s most brilliant forwards.) Australia had beaten England 2–0 in London, in April; a World Cup win was not unthinkable. But, at the final whistle, in Sydney, the Australian players sat and cried. England danced to “Sweet Caroline.”
For the past three weeks, much of the off-field talk, among soccer journalists and visiting commentators, had been about whether Australia—where football has always been a secondary sport—had become a soccer nation. The answer, from the start of the tournament, has been a slow, rumbling yes. I sat in desperately sold-out stadiums, and thousands of people crowded to watch in public squares and parks. A Reddit commenter in Australia recounted driving around delivering pizza and seeing every single TV tuned in to the Matildas’ game. In Melbourne, officials opened the grounds of the Australian Open and of Australian Rules stadiums, and people sat in the stands, in front of empty fields, watching soccer on the big screens. It felt as if soccer were taking over; it made the loss more painful.
England, who had struggled to beat Haiti, and nearly lost to Nigeria on penalties, seemed to reserve their most ruthless level for the semi. The team was missing its best attacking player, the midfielder Lauren James, but her replacement, Ella Toone, scored the opener in Sydney with a spear of a shot that swerved off her right foot.
Kerr equalized, and, for the next eight minutes, Australia pressed. The statistics—the refuge of the loser—show that England, over the match, was only slightly better. Both teams had five shots on target; the expected goals—a measure of the quality of those shots and chances—was in England’s favor only by 0.05 of a goal. But, in real life, at 1–1, Ellie Carpenter, Australia’s right back, who plays for Lyon, and was coming back from a yearlong A.C.L. injury, failed to sweep away a ball, and England’s Lauren Hemp fired it into the Australian goal. Sport is close and exhilarating and hopeful until it isn’t. England’s third goal came in the eighty-sixth minute, against a desperately rejigged attacking Australian side.
Even at 2–1, Kerr missed two chances that, perhaps, she could have taken, if she had been more match-sharp. Maybe the difference was Sarina Wiegman, England’s coach, a tactical master from the Netherlands, who has now made the finals of two consecutive World Cups, and won two successive European Championships, with two different teams. England will face Spain on Sunday, in the final, in the same stadium.
The loss will sting less soon, and eyes have already turned to the future. To get here, Australia had beaten France, in the longest penalty shoot-out in World Cup history, women’s or men’s. They destroyed Canada, the Olympic gold medallists, 4–0, while Kerr, injured, sat grinning on the bench. England had its own transformative soccer moment, in 2022, when the country hosted, and won, the Women’s European Championship. The Guardian journalist Suzanne Wrack, who was there, said that this year in Australia felt “next level. It has permeated so much more deeply into society than it did during the Euros.” The player who took Australia’s winning penalty against France—the scarcely believable twentieth kick—Cortnee Vine, plays for Sydney F.C. During the tournament, the club’s women’s team broke its record for member sign-ups, two months before the season starts.
This World Cup has also brought new heights for women’s soccer globally, not just for its hosts. At various points, thirteen million people in Brazil watched their team play a single match; ten million in Germany watched theirs; and, in China, fifty-four million people watched their team’s last group game. Almost as many people in England watched the match against Australia, at 11 A.M. local time, as had watched their own Euros semifinal. Teams from Haiti, Nigeria, and Colombia held or beat the top teams of Europe. More Americans watched the U.S.’s matches at this World Cup, until the team was knocked out, than did in 2019, despite pre-dawn kickoff times.
After an England win, fans like to sing “It’s coming home,” the chorus of “Three Lions,” which was originally written to mark England’s hosting of the men’s 1996 European Championships. (They lost in the semis.) It’s a song mostly about hurt and failure. It has lately been adopted to refer to winning—bringing “back”—the World Cup. This repurposing has always sat strangely with me, not for the presumption of winning, but of ownership. I watched England’s quarterfinal match, a close 2–1 win against Colombia, and, on the way out of the stadium, two English fans yelled at the Australians who had come to watch. “Stick to swimming!” one shouted. “Stick to surfing!”
One of the most beloved sayings in Australian soccer—or football, as some of its fans prefer to call it—is “I told you so.” It was the catchphrase of Johnny Warren, a former captain of the men’s team, who, after he retired, took on the burden of being the chief soccer evangelist, educator, and optimist in a country that, broadly, did not really care. Warren, who died in 2004, said that Australia could win the World Cup. He thought that soccer could grow to become the country’s favorite sport. “I told you so” was something he imagined saying, at some future point, to those who disagreed. On Wednesday, eleven-and-a-half million people were watching on TV at home, making the game the most-viewed program since the current Australian television-ratings system began. More were watching in public and overseas. In the stadium, tens of thousands of people stayed long after it was over. ♦
