On the first day of June in 1988, 11 Australian women walked out onto a scrappy football pitch in the Chinese city of Jiangmen.
The air was oppressively hot and sticky with humidity; a normal southern Chinese summer. Thousands of locals in cotton shirts and wide-brimmed hats lined the shallow stands, as curious about Westerners as they were about the sport itself. Many of them were school children who shrieked with delight at every strong tackle or big header.
