Matildas set off on Asian Cup journey to prove home sequel can be better than the original | OneFootball

The Women’s Asian Cup is a sequel with a difference. Not bigger, and surely not better than the magnificent 2023 World Cup, when the Matildas entranced Australia during their run to the semi-finals.

But there is enough intrigue in the script – coaching frenemies, unlikely injury comebacks, last hurrahs, footballing minnows and mirrors of multicultural Australia, even fairytale romance – that it will hold the nation’s football community riveted. Whether the continental championship bursts out into a broader cultural phenomenon, however, will be one of the compelling questions of the next three weeks.

All agree the 2023 tournament changed Australia forever, yet the extent to which remains up for debate. Former national team forward and now Asian Cup chief operating officer, Sarah Walsh, told the Guardian in November, that naysayers had long been expecting the Matildas’ “bubble to burst”.

According to the turnout to watch the Matildas prepare this week, it remains intact and mostly inflated. The crowd at the Asian Cup opener in Perth on Sunday is set to be at, or close to, the venue’s 60,000 capacity, even if several hundred tickets were still available the day before the game. The number of fans at the team’s open training session on Wednesday was estimated at 800. And only a few dozen seats are available for the Matildas’ match against Iran on the Gold Coast on Thursday.

However, that venue has a capacity of just 27,000, and ticket sales for the marquee group stage match between Australia and South Korea at Sydney’s Olympic Stadium on International Women’s Day are slower than expected. Walsh had predicted a rapid sellout for that clash, but on Saturday there were still thousands of seats available on the Ticketmaster website, including dozens of resale tickets.

Filling some of the country’s largest arenas on the eve of the AFL and NRL seasons, with the Australian women’s cricket team midway through their series against India, was never going to be easy. But this is now par for a team which has claims to the title of Australia’s favourite.

Sam Kerr’s profile has only been amplified by her UK legal dramas, but it may soon be eclipsed by the new face of the team, Mary Fowler, who has overcome a serious knee injury to be selected in the 26-player squad. Like the Matildas captain, Fowler also made headlines during her injury layoff, for claims of racism at a former club in her book, as well as her burgeoning relationship with rugby league player Nathan Cleary.

The appeal of Kerr, Fowler, and the trio of Champions League-winning Arsenal players in Steph Catley, Caitlin Foord and Kyra Cooney-Cross is a godsend for organisers who have been working hard to sell tickets to Australia’s matches and others involving lesser lights such as Bangladesh and Uzbekistan.

This 12-team tournament has fewer global heavyweights involved compared to the 2023 showpiece, and features only four sides – Japan, South Korea, North Korea and China – that should trouble the host nation.

The reach of the tournament is also impaired given two of the country’s proudest footballing cities Melbourne and Adelaide have been overlooked for matches, due to hosting deals struck exclusively with the Western Australia, New South Wales and Queensland governments.

Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium, the site of the 2023 tournament’s most memorable occasion – the Matildas’ shootout victory in the last eight against France – has also been left out, with matches instead held down the highway on the Gold Coast.

The penalty hero of that night, Cortnee Vine, is one of only two to take the field during the 2023 semi-final defeat to England now missing from the Asian Cup squad, alongside retired defender Clare Polkinghorne. The winger was not selected by new coach Joe Montemurro, having struggled with her mental health and taken time out of the game in the intervening years.

The makeup of the squad highlights that while much has happened since the 2023 tournament, the Matildas are largely the same. Still, Kerr believes the 2026 crop might still beat those 2023 Matildas, widely considered the high-water mark of achievement for this talented generation. “From when I started, to the first World Cup [in 2011] I went to, to the last World Cup I went to, I think the team honestly gets better and better every year,” she said. “I think it would be a good game to be honest.”

Kerr, 32, straddles multiple Matildas eras. She is the only player still playing from the victorious 2010 Asian Cup side, and is preparing for her fifth continental showpiece. “Going in as a little bit of a dark horse [in 2010] helped us as a team and now, with the pressure that I guess the Matildas carry, we’ve just tried to not talk about it [the expectation].”

The hopes of the home nation are heavy, and anything less than a valiant semi-final defeat will be considered a failure. The Matildas’ struggles since the 2023 tournament have left them as only the third-highest ranked side in the tournament – at No 15 – behind Japan at No 8 and North Korea one spot further back.

Yet there is a renewed energy in camp thanks to the belated arrival of Montemurro last year. When Kerr was asked on Saturday whether this year’s team could beat Tony Gustavsson’s 2023 edition, the former Arsenal coach drew a smile from his captain when he made a gesture to point out that he is perhaps the biggest difference between the two incarnations.

The often comedic Melburnian is an established and well-liked figure in women’s football, and helped send longtime friend and now Philippines coach Mark Torcaso down the professional path. Their showdown on Sunday will prove to be the first of the tournament’s many storylines. “What an occasion, obviously we dream of these occasions in our sport,” Montemurro said, anticipating the coming weeks will be a “fantastic journey”.

Header image: [Photograph: Matt Jelonek/AAP]