Sarah Walsh has heard the naysayers, heard the voices sniggering about half-empty stadiums and unsold tickets. The chief operating officer of the Women’s Asian Cup knows the insinuation behind them all: that the Matildas – clearly Australia’s favourite sporting team during the run to the World Cup semi-finals three years ago – have lost their lustre.
But the woman who played 70 times for Australia also has a voice, and she wasn’t shy in using it on Thursday to address “segments” of the country who want to see the Matildas fail.
“Some people don’t like change,” Walsh says, announcing ticket sales for Saturday’s final between Australia and Japan had passed 60,000. “They’re a lightning rod for change, and so if the Matildas are still doing well, it suggests that things are changing.”
The 35,170 crowd for the semi-final between Australia and China on Tuesday barely filled half of the 60,000-seat Perth Stadium, and at kick-off many of those ticket holders had not yet entered the ground. As the anthems played, the empty bays prompted speculation about what has happened since the Matildas recorded 16 consecutive home sellouts.
“I hear those comments and I really don’t want to give them any airtime today, but I just think it’s really important [to say] in every single measure, this [the Women’s Asian Cup] has been a success,” Walsh says. Targets for tourism were “smashed” by early November, she adds. And beyond the numbers, Walsh was proud that the tournament had “embedded multicultural Australia”.
The crowd of 17,367 which watched Japan’s impressive 4-1 semi-final win over South Korea on Wednesday set a record for the highest attendance at a Women’s Asian Cup game between two non-host nation teams. The mark had already been broken twicein the tournament, by two 10,000-plus crowds at Stadium Australia for the quarter-finals.
Although the Matildas have struggled to sell out their matches, they will have attracted about 250,000 attenders over three weeks, and ticket sales for the tournament have beaten the previous Women’s Asian Cup record by a factor of five.
“If people are still thinking about the Women’s World Cup, that’s fine, that might have been their first experience,” Walsh says. “But this is a Women’s Asian Cup, and I think there’s some education through that as well.”
Organisers had to spread a tournament of only a handful of elite teams across three states in a compressed schedule, just as Australia’s sporting eyes were turned by the start of the AFL and NRL seasons, as well as the Formula One grand prix in Melbourne.
The Matildas’ opener against the Philippines drew a TV audience on Channel Ten of 635,000 according to VOZ, fractionally smaller than Nine’s coverage of their Las Vegas NRL opener on the same day. The Australia and Iran match attracted 466,000 viewers, a little more than half the number that watched the AFL season-opener between Sydney and Carlton.
Interest appears to be trending up as the stakes rise. The 722,000 audience for the Matildas’ third group match against South Korea eclipsed the free-to-air AFL and NRL broadcasts on the same day, and the quarter-final against North Korea drew 634,000 despite stiff competition in the Friday nighttime slot with the NRL (693,000) and AFL (557,000). The Australia-China semi-final on Tuesday averaged more than 900,000 viewers, despite a 9pm kick-off in Sydney and Melbourne, setting the scene for a nation-stopping broadcast on Saturday.
The Asian Cup decider looms as the toughest test for the Matildas since the Paris Games, on an occasion almost as grand. At the old Olympic Stadium in Sydney, a crowd close to the capacity of 76,000 will experience something resembling that stirring World Cup semi-final three years ago, when Sam Kerr’s goal gave local fans hope before England prevailed 3-1.
That match set a benchmark for free-to-air audiences after it attracted more than 7 million viewers. That record won’t be eclipsed on Saturday, but the match will still be one of the standout TV sporting events of the year. Japan are the powerhouse side in the tournament and its highest ranked, at No 6 in the world, and will be out to repeat their triumphs over the Matildas in the final of the 2014 and 2018 editions.
Melissa Barbieri, the former Matildas goalkeeper who was part of the team that last won the trophy in 2010, began to tear up when asked what Saturday night means to her. “We are a nation of many different faces and colours and creeds and genders, and I feel like when we are together, we are unstoppable,” she says, adding the Matildas will be motivated by the tag of underdogs. “I just think if we all get fired up for the night, we’ll just really show the world what Australia can do.”
Walsh encouraged people to look past the Matildas to assess the value of the tournament. “We have 5, 6 million Australians that identify with one of the 11 nations that are not Australia,” she says. “We need more of this connection and unity right now.”
