The Matildas’ near misses sting but their Asian Cup final suggests this great team are not done | OneFootball

Two steps to the left. That’s probably all the space Alanna Kennedy needed to poke the ball away from the edge of her own penalty area and back into the field of possibility.

But these are the gaps where football lives, in the inches that open and close like a hand, and by the time the veteran midfielder had spun in surprise, the ball was thwacking the back of the net as Maika Hamano wheeled off into the night.

As the Matildas chased the rest of Saturday night’s Asian Cup final, piercing and wrestling and bombarding their opponents, the inches came and went. Caitlin Foord’s panicked shot in front of a wide-eyed Ayaka Yamashita which spun wildly out for a throw; Emily van Egmond’s double-strike that ricocheted off a blue wall; Kennedy’s towering header that speared right into a steady pair of gloves.

This has been the Matildas’ story over the past few years: a story of almosts, of reaching but never quite touching the thing they’ve always wanted.

A brave semi-final exit from their home Women’s World Cup and a runners-up finish at their home Asian Cup is the closest this team – perhaps the greatest Matildas team Australia will ever know – has come to football immortality.

“It’s nice to be charming and talented and all that, but you need to win in order to make history,” Japan’s coach Nils Nielsen said after the final.

In some ways, he is right: the glassy eyes and choked-up interviews of Australia’s players after the 1-0 loss reflected that reckoning.

But there was something about the way they lost – the way they fought with fire until the very end, playing some of the smartest and deadliest football we’ve seen from them in years, pushing an almost invincible team and likely World Cup challengers to the very edge – that gave us a glimpse of something else, a space unfolding ahead of them.

“For us to be a top team … we have to be able to create situations with the ball,” Joe Montemurro said after the match. “And doing [that] against one of the top teams in the world, in the way we did it, it gives me hope. It gives me belief.

“But more importantly, it gives the players belief. That’s the most important thing. This team needs to believe more in who they are and what they can do and what they can achieve, and this tournament has shown that.

“They’ve understood our gameplan. They’ve understood our approach. Sometimes when things fall for you, they fall for you. Sometimes they don’t. But for us, this has been an excellent journey.”

There was a lot of talk of “lasts” in the lead-up to this Asian Cup, particularly when it came to this golden generation of Matildas. Many are now in their early 30s and entering the sunset of their careers. This tournament was meant to be their last hurrah at home; a final shot to commemorate an astonishing cultural rise with something they could hold in their hands.

But after their performance in the final, there is suddenly a glimmer of something else; a few more inches this team could find. With the next Women’s World Cup just 15 months away, and the core players still competing at the highest levels, is it too soon to write them off for another remarkable run in Brazil?

Energised by the youth of Mary Fowler, Kyra Cooney-Cross, Kaitlyn Torpey, Amy Sayer and Winonah Heatley, and showing the green shoots of a new type of proactive, thoughtful football that they have time to nurture, there may be hope yet that this Matildas team who have transformed Australian sport will have something shiny to show for it before the end.

But Japan’s Asian Cup showed where the gaps still exist for Australia and what closing them could look like. Their performances over the past three weeks are a testament to the system, vision and long-term strategy that Japan united behind more than 20 years ago.

These players are the first generation to emerge from that system, and the football they played showed its power. Can Australia follow their blueprint? Montemurro, and generations of Matildas to come, will hope so.

“We have a tendency in this country to try something, doesn’t work, we start something else,” the head coach said in a rallying cry to the domestic game.

“We’ve got to decide who we are, what we want to be, and where we want to be in 10 to 15 years’ time and stick to it. Stick to it. We’re chopping and changing, doing this and that.

“We’ve got to believe in an identity … and it has to start at youth levels, and we have to keep that consistency going.

“There’s a way of going about it. For me, it’s about consistency of programs, and understanding what our identity is, who we are, what we’re good at, and where we think we can go.”

Header image: [Photograph: Matt King/Getty Images]