As the host nations and tournament organisers bask in the warm afterglow of the wildly successful Fifa Women’s World Cup, it’s easy to forget that anxiety permeated the build-up.
There was the stand-off over broadcasting rights for five Western European countries accounting for 35% of the anticipated global audience. The brinksmanship continued until the 11th hour, prompting government intervention.
There was uncertainty over whether Kiwis would take an interest in, let alone embrace, the event. A month out, Fifa’s head of women’s football, New Zealander Sarai Bareman, admitted sluggish ticket sales were a concern. A week out, Fifa announced it would hand out 5000 free tickets in each of the four New Zealand host cities. At that stage, only six of our allocated 29 games were fully or nearly sold out.
Talk about being all right on the night. A 43,217-strong crowd, the largest ever for a football match in this country, rolled up at Eden Park to see the Football Ferns get the tournament off to a promoter’s dream start by beating 1995 world champions Norway. Hitherto, our men’s and women’s combined record at World Cups was played 22, won zero. An even more positive indicator of public engagement was that 30,000 turned out the following Monday to watch Argentina play Italy at the same venue.
A fortnight later, as the round of 16 got under way, Fred Woodcock, Stuff’s national sports editor, wrote that “football really has flexed its muscles, the punters have responded and all other sports codes, including rugby, have been blown out of the water”.
The overall numbers validate that bold assertion. Fifa set a goal of 500,000 spectators in New Zealand; they got 708,743. To give that some context, last year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup, deemed a resounding success, attracted 150,179 spectators to the 26 matches, although there were some double- and triple-headers.
The tournament’s live audience in Australia and New Zealand was 1.9 million against a target of 1.5 million. The Australian television audience for both the Matildas’ knockout games exceeded 7 million, which dwarfed State of Origin and the AFL and NRL grand finals and was the highest for a sports event since Cathy Freeman won gold in the 400m at the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
While the public response was, to an extent, event-driven, enthusiasm would have waned if the on-field product had failed to live up to the history and hype surrounding World Cups.
Fears that the pool stage would be a predictable cull, more an expression of the game’s global reach than genuine competition, proved unfounded. The Ferns set the tone by beating Norway, after which upsets and nailbiters outnumbered cakewalks. Gallingly, the Ferns’ agonising loss to the Philippines, which cost them a place in the round of 16, also qualified as a surprise result. The Ferns were in good company, though. You expect the odd upset at any tournament, but who would have predicted that Nigeria, Jamaica and Morocco would advance at the expense of, respectively, Olympic champions Canada, soccer-mad Brazil and European championship runners-up Germany?
Biggest Surprise
On the face of it, women’s football superpower USA’s failure to make the quarter-finals after finishing in the top three at all eight previous tournaments was the biggest surprise of all. In the event, their toothless performances in pool play indicated they were a team on the slide. For every loser, there’s a winner: ex-president Donald Trump’s legal jeopardy has grown faster than the national debt, but he had the last laugh in his long-running spat with Team America’s social and political activists, notably veteran Megan Rapinoe. Trump reacted to their elimination in typically rabid fashion: “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!!!”
The tournament showcased the best of sport: skill, athleticism, creativity, grace under pressure. There were moments that exemplified the dictum that top-level sport is a game of millimetres, none more so than the offside decision that denied the Ferns against the Philippines. But surely the most dramatic passage of play was the protracted penalty shootout before an increasingly frenzied Brisbane crowd that decided the Matildas’ quarter-final against France.
There are grounds for disliking the penalty shootout. For instance, it seems cruel to place such a crushing responsibility on players who aren’t in the team to put the ball in the back of the net. It’s like making a specialist batter and occasional net bowler bowl the super over in a deadlocked Cricket World Cup knockout game. Australian goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold had kept her team in it with her saves, but was then called upon to take a spot kick that would have sealed the game. Not surprisingly, she failed.
“I hate pens,” said Australian captain Sam Kerr. “I just think it’s such a bad way for anyone to lose.” Or as the Washington Post’s Candace Buckner put it: “It’s as though the folks who invented the game chose chaos, drenched it in randomness, then candy-coated it in agony and said, ‘Yes, this is the proper way to decide a winner.’”
Always pitiless, often anti-climactic, sometimes excruciating, but occasionally, as in this instance, epic.
Fitting Final
Spain and England provided the final the tournament deserved, a high-quality contest involving an intriguing contrast of styles. Beforehand, majority opinion among the punditry favoured England. What were they thinking? England suffering World Cup heartbreak is up there with death and taxes.
Indeed, living with that inevitability is the theme of England’s World Cup song Three Lions, aka “Football’s coming home”: “So many jokes/So many sneers/ But all those oh-so-nears/ Wear you down through the years.” It was written by comedians David Baddiel and Frank Skinner in 1996 to mark the hosting of the European Championship – England lost their semifinal against Germany in a penalty shootout – and harks back to the nation’s one and only football World Cup triumph, in 1966: “Thirty years of hurt/Never stopped me dreaming.”
Come the 2026 Men’s World Cup the years of hurt will have doubled.
Spain’s turbulent journey to the summit was a reminder that World Cups are one-off events that can take on a life of their own and at which time-honoured principles and strategies for achieving sporting success don’t necessarily apply. The focus is invariably on building confidence and momentum through discipline and consistency on and off the pitch. Now and again, though, successful tournament teams are those that shrug off distractions, self-inflicted and otherwise, handle curve balls and harness chaos.
Beforehand, 15 leading players declared they wouldn’t play under coach Jorge Vilda. (Three subsequently returned to the fold.) The squad had hardly set foot in New Zealand before testing their hosts with a swiftly deleted video of four players doing a mock haka. They then doubled down by abandoning their Palmerston North training base, reportedly because the city bored them to tears.
Shades of English comedian John Cleese laying into the jewel of Manawatū after he’d performed there in 2005. He was complimentary about other cities, including Invercargill, which he pronounced “delightful”, a happy contrast to a Rolling Stones’ – some say Mick Jagger, others Keith Richards – 1966 sledge that our southernmost city was “the arsehole of the world”. Palmy, however, got torched: “If you wish to kill yourself but lack the courage to,” said Cleese, “I think a visit to Palmerston North will do the trick.”
The locals retaliated by acting on the late, Palmerston North-born John Clarke’s suggestion that they rename a landfill site after Cleese with the tag-line “All manner of crap happily recycled.”
After less than convincingly protesting their fondness for PN, the Spanish women copped a 4-0 hiding from Japan. They shrugged that off, too, breezing through their other pool games and overcoming two tough heavyweights in the Netherlands and Sweden to make the final.
Their long and winding road stretched into the final’s aftermath when acting captain and scorer of the winning goal Olga Carmona learnt that her father had died two days earlier. Her family had kept the news from her. And with thudding predictability, a male big-shot took a little of the gloss off Spanish women’s soccer’s moment of glory: Spanish football federation president Luis Rubiales just had to plant an unwanted kiss on midfielder Jenni Hermoso’s lips.
Supercharge needed?
What now? Will co-hosting the World Cup really “supercharge” women’s sport in general and football in particular as many are claiming?
First, like last year’s Women’s Rugby World Cup, it has spectacularly discredited the old argument that women’s sport doesn’t generate enough public interest to warrant the investment, sponsorship and media coverage bestowed on men’s sport. Second, it will certainly turbo-charge participation at junior levels. Football Australia is expecting a 20% increase in the number of girls and young women taking up the game, and there’s no reason to think that won’t be replicated here.
However, some of the more grandiose statements, such as New Zealand Football chief executive Andrew Pragnell’s claim that “hundreds of thousands of Kiwis have fallen in love with the game”, seem like premature extrapolation.
Hundreds of thousands of Kiwis fell in love with having a World Cup right here, but that’s not quite the same thing. They fell in love with the novelty, the spectacle, the global nature of the event, the quality of performance. The reality is, though, that it will be decades before the circus is back in town.
History tells us the feel-good factor will dissipate pretty quickly. As Lloyd Cole sings in Fall Together, “Nothing very good or very bad will ever last for very long.” Football was supposedly on the brink of rivalling or even surpassing rugby in this country after the All Whites’ 1982 and 2010 World Cup campaigns. It didn’t happen, largely because the game was unable to generate a top-quality sports/entertainment product week after week, month after month, year after year.
Nor have our teams been able to kick on, so to speak. At the elite level, effort, grit and team spirit aren’t enough. You need a cutting edge; you need to score goals. As Australian coach Tony Gustavsson said after the Matildas were eliminated, “tournament football is won and lost inside the 18 [yard box]”.
Going into the tournament, the Ferns had scored three goals in 810 minutes of play; at the tournament, they scored one goal in 270 minutes. If they’d scored against the Philippines, they would have progressed to the next stage. They couldn’t manage that against opponents who leaked eight goals in their two other pool games.
This is an issue for New Zealand football generally: men’s and women’s, age group and full international. We don’t seem to produce players with the virtuoso technical skills, reflexes and poacher’s instincts to unlock good defences.
Perhaps the most interesting proposition advanced post-tournament was that much of the event’s appeal lay in the fact it was devoid of the unedifying aspects of men’s sport – the foul play, the trash talk, the simmering aggression that can flare into acrimony at any moment.
We were largely spared the absurd theatrics and gamesmanship bordering on cheating that we take for granted at Fifa Men’s World Cups. Probably the most memorable feature of Brazil’s 2018 World Cup campaign was star forward Neymar’s silent-movie-style simulations of intense suffering.
In the long run, so the theory goes, this could be women’s sport’s trump card.
There’s another side to that coin, though. Controversy gets people talking and generates headlines; controversy propels sport from the back page to the front. Women in sport are arguably too well behaved for their own good.
And as women’s sport becomes a bigger and bigger deal, the stakes will get higher, the money on offer will increase, as will the pressure to do whatever it takes to win. “[Women] just want to play,” said Sweden assistant coach Magnus Wikman. “They don’t think that way. Maybe in the future it’s going to change because there’s going to be more and more money in women’s soccer.”
A case, perhaps, of be careful what you wish for.