This is just the beginning.
A record home crowd for a Matildas game of 50,629 piled into Marvel Stadium in Melbourne on Friday night – and the crazy scenes have not been lost on football commentators.
Australia has caught a bad case of Matildas fever ahead of the Women’s World Cup, beginning on Thursday night when Australia faces Ireland.
It helps that the record crowd travelled back from the stadium with the joy of watching Australia win 1-0 against a French team ranked No. 5 in the world.
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With the roof of the Docklands stadium closed, spectators have described the scene as deafening when Mary Fowler slotted the winner in the 66th minute.
The win has in many ways been overshadowed by the spectacle unfolding off the pitch as the crowd shattered the previous record for a Matildas game. The previous record was set in 2021 when 36,109 watched the Matildas take on the United States.
And the record will last just under a week with next week’s tournament opener at Sydney’s Accor Stadium already sold out.
Australian sports presenter Neroli Meadows was among those to be taken aback at how significantly the landscape has changed for the Matildas ahead of an event widely accepted to be the biggest event Australia has hosted since the 2000 Olympics.
“We’re getting somewhere,” she wrote with a photo showing the heaving crowd outside the stadium.
She was far from the only one coming to the same conclusion about the bright future for women’s professional football in Australia.
The Australian taxpayer is going to make sure of it with $230 million set to be spent on a “Legacy 23” plan to continue to drive the sport across all aspects of the sporting landscape.
The event, described by Football Australia CEO James Johnson as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity”, is expected to have a global audience of more than one billion people.
The expected crowd of 80,000 for Australia’s World Cup opener will be something else.
There were numerous cases of football being the hottest ticket in town on Friday night with the crowd easily surpassing the 38,030 people that watched the Demons-Lions match at the MCG.
There was one sight that was particularly poignant, considering the spiking popularity the Matildas are riding right now.
After the game, Australian captain Sam Kerr, who was subbed out after 62 minutes, was happy with the hitout.
“It was always going to be an important game, they’re a great team and I thought we put in a great performance,” she said.
“But this is all about the journey and all about building confidence for next week.”
Asked what she learned from the performance, Kerr said: “We’re bloody quick.”
“We’ve been waiting for this moment for a very long time and it’s a dream come true bringing the World Cup to Oz and this crowd’s been amazing and this is why we do it — for the fans,” Kerr added.
“It’s been an unbelievable week and hopefully an unbelievable month to come.”