Australian football is enjoying something of a moment. Last winter, the men’s national team matched their best ever World Cup performance by reaching the last-16 in Qatar, before this summer, the Matildas went further, all the way to the semi-finals in the women’s equivalent on home soil, both runs greeted with a frenzy unprecedented in a country where rugby and cricket are more embedded and Aussie rules does what it says on the tin.
“The images and footage of the Australian public, it’s something that I don’t think any other sport has been able to do in that regard,” Mat Ryan, the Socceroos No1, tells Standard Sport. “People getting up at all hours of the night to attend public areas and events with giant screens. To be able to have that influence on our country is something where you have to pinch yourself."
In some ways, then, it is a shame that Graham Arnold’s side play both of their matches during this international break thousands of miles from home, against England at Wembley and then New Zealand in Brentford next Tuesday. Any fear of a buzz dissipating, though, is offset by the fact that while club football pauses, it does so with an Australian manager in charge of the Tottenham side sat top of the Premier League.
“There’s definitely a perception with Australians and football where we don’t feel we get the respect that we deserve,” Ryan explains. “And there’s a perception out there that Australians don’t play the sport that well. To have Ange Postecoglou coaching at the pinnacle of the game and doing as well as he is proves that perception wrong.
“As soon as we come in we’re all talking about Ange and how well he’s doing, how proud we all are. We’re all following and we can’t not tune into the games that Tottenham are playing now because we’re all behind him. He’s making Australia proud.”
How does Ryan personally rate the man who first made him the country’s No1 goalkeeper during a four-year stint at the helm of the national team? Unsurprisingly, very highly indeed.
“All the principles and characteristics that he instills as a manager are the benchmark in terms of experiences I’ve had with other managers,” he says. “His speeches in the last team meeting on a match day, every time you walk out of there you want to run through a brick wall for him.
“He finds a way to tap into the meaningful things in your life to make you want to do that. He’s got this knack for getting team up to play the next match as if it could be their last match.”
Despite both having friendly status, no extra motivation is likely to be needed across either of Australia’s engagements this fortnight, which constitute consecutive grudge matches of sorts.
The ‘Soccer Ashes’ sound, on first hearing, like a piggy-back marketing ploy, football’s attempt to drag a summer’s cricketing narrative into an autumn friendly short of much more to go on.
In fact, they are rather more storied. The trophy itself was forged a century ago, a wooden vessel built to contain the remnants of cigars smoked by the rivalry’s first captains, themselves locked within a razor case carried into battle at Gallipoli during the First World War. The catch? That it is the fixture with New Zealand, not England, that offers the prize.
“To be honest, I didn’t know a lot about it,” Ryan says and that is hardly a surprise: nor did anyone else until the Ashes, last played for in 1954, were rediscovered in a suburban garage earlier this year. “Whether it’s the Olympics, rugby, cricket, whenever there’s a moment where these nations come up against each other, they’re the two big foes that we have and we always like to get bragging rights over.”
Now playing his club football in the Netherlands with AZ Alkmaar, said rights aren’t quite the commodity they were during his Brighton days, when he would regularly “butt heads” with Solly March in the Ashes stakes. Ryan, though, considered himself a big cricket fans and was still gripped by this summer’s 2-2 series.
“It was a see-sawing contest,” he says, declining the accepted parlance that, actually, the series ‘ebbed and flowed’. “The English weather played a helping hand for us but whatever it takes at the end of the day to get the win” - he quickly corrects - “or the draw. But we retained the Ashes. That’s as much a win for us.”
In the development of an improving Australian side, a famous one at Wembley tonight would go a long way.
Tickets to the Soccer Ashes game at Brentford are available, priced from £12 for under-17s, £14 for young adults (18-24) and seniors, and £16 for adults. To book a ticket now, visit: www.eticketing.co.uk/brentfordfc
