Last night, thanks to an organised defence and clinical finishes from Caitlin Foord and Hayley Raso, the Matildas held off a strong challenge from Denmark and progressed to the quarter-finals of the Women’s World Cup.
Injury-plagued superstar Sam Kerr got her first tournament minutes under her belt, coming on for the final 10 minutes. Good news, right? Well, not for the Australians opposed to the Matildas on… sigh… “woke” grounds.
We’re not sure exactly when this started. In the lead-up to this month’s tournament, Andrew Bolt on Sky News dedicated a segment to complaining about the Matildas’ campaign to receive the same prize money as the men’s team for tournament appearances. Bolt obviously wanted only the most informed guest to discuss this apparent “culture war”, and when none of those people answered their phone, he got noted thing-sayer and clump of stuffing attempting to escape a doll Rowan Dean.
“What’s an athlete doing talking about collective bargaining?” Dean incredulously wondered, presumably while not planning on googling the history or present of how Australia’s AFL and cricket teams secured the employment conditions they enjoy.
Then there was the yoga-style stretch from Sky News to connect NSW Premier Chris Minns’ decision to light up the Sydney Opera House green and gold as a tribute to the “woke” Matildas, despite having failed to do anything to mark King Charles’ coronation.
The Xitters (is that what we’re calling them?) quoted in that piece, the kind of people proving that the meaning of a blue tick has been completely inverted now that you have to pay for it, have continued along the same lines, actively hoping the Matildas lose.
Famously, during Mussolini’s reign, the dictator tried to replace pasta, the staple dish for most of Italy, with rice. We suspect trying to turn Australians against a successful sporting team qualifies as a similar misreading of the public you’re trying to convince.
As is so often the case, visceral loathing of women’s sport is just a US culture war corpse that has washed up on our shores and is being prodded by Australia’s right to see if it stirs into life. America’s right has been at war with the US women’s national team for years.
The team, which undermined the whole “go woke go broke” thing by winning the 2019 World Cup, did not accept an invitation to visit the White House after that tournament, and team captain Megan Rapinoe openly criticised then-president Donald Trump.
So when the team managed only a bronze medal at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo, Trump — an adult man who at one point decided matters of state for the world’s biggest superpower, and may again — put out a statement:
If our soccer team, headed by a radical group of leftist maniacs, wasn’t woke, they would have won the gold medal instead of the bronze. The woman with the purple hair played terribly and spends too much time thinking about radical left politics and not doing her job.
Rapinoe (the “woman with the purple hair”) scored twice in their bronze-medal 4-3 victory against the Matildas. Trump, now via his Truth Social platform, gleefully marked the defending champion’s failure to progress past Sweden, thanks to a missed penalty from Rapinoe:
Many of our players were openly hostile to America — No other country behaved in such a manner, or even close. WOKE EQUALS FAILURE. Nice shot Megan, the USA is going to Hell!!! MAGA
Former US men’s national player Alexi Lalas and a coterie of dudes who rock joined in the patriotic tradition of being delighted your usually dominant team has lost.
Of course, Australians have never been known to be overly bothered by sports stars’ views or personal lives as long as they keep winning. So as long as the Matildas’ march to the final goes on, it’s unlikely any of the Aldi Trump’s in Australia’s Parliament are going to mine them for culture war fodder.
Could you care any less about what Andrew Bolt et al think about the Matildas? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
