When Matildas goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold shocked the nation – and World Cup opponents France – with her penalty-saving heroics on Saturday, her teammates were distinctly unsurprised. “That’s Macca doing Macca things,” said Tameka Yallop a couple of days later. “She does that all the time in training. So for us it wasn’t anything new.” Sam Kerr joked that she was glad it was not only her own penalties being saved by Arnold. “She saves all our pens at training and gives us no confidence,” the striker said.
Her goalkeeping counterpart, Lydia Williams, described Arnold’s shot-stopping as “natural”, even “innate”. Those skills paid off as the quarter-final went to penalties, and then extended into the longest-ever shootout in World Cup history. “I talk to her about it and I’m like ‘I don’t know how you do it,’” Williams said earlier this week. “‘And she says: ‘I don’t know how I do it.’ And that’s the end of that conversation.”
