The Matildas playing in Adelaide, what an excuse for another visit to this lovely city, and 20 hours later, heading back to rainy Sydney, more footballing memories of following our national team had been made. The football didn’t live up to what we were hoping for, more of a chess match than a full-blooded international shoot-out, but the good times certainly made up for it.
As has become the norm for football away days, the breakfast of champions of a Maccas bacon and egg roll and a pint at the Fat Yak bar gets us ready for the flight, and today we had just enough time before boarding the two-hour flight to Adelaide. While Sydney and Melbourne tend not to get too excited about big sporting games, Adelaide had pulled out all the stops and the airport was plastered with Matildas livery, showing what sport means to the people of this city. This could have been the World Cup all over again.
Our accommodation was in the East End of town, and as we discovered, it is the area of the city that tends to stay open late and has a lot of restaurants, bars and nightclubs whilst retaining its quiet aura. The rain that had been threatening started as soon as we arrived, and we were happy to be enjoying a first couple of ultra-strength beers at the famous Belgian Beer Cafe while the rain cleared. I left the crew as we headed to the pre-game venue at the other side of town and ventured to the stadium on foot to pick up accreditation from the media office. The leafy feel of the last day of autumn made the streets look lovely, and the 20-minute walk to the stadium, with the route through the grounds of the University, was eye-catching.
The area around the stadium is parkland, with statues and monuments, churches and greenery, a lovely setting for the city’s major sporting venue. The merchandise stands were being set up, the barriers and gates were set up and ready to go, and I found the pick-up spot for media and the system worked. One lanyard and media pass later, I was off back into town via the edgier side of town, which had a Melbourne feel to it with old and new buildings side-by-side and grafitti-filled walls proudly on display. Destination the Black Bull on Rundle Street, and the area was super-lively, with venues filling up on this final day of the work week.
This was a pre-game venue in three parts. A pub on one side, a pizzeria on the other and a big barn out the back that had been set aside for the Matildas Active fans to congregate and get ready for the night ahead. The atmosphere built up as the beers flowed, and the many faces from national games around the country and across the world were here to enjoy pre-match vibe. Well done to the organisers for finding such a great venue.
I was out of there early, keen to get to the stadium in good time and get set up in media. I’d get down to ground level later if the opportunity arose, but this one I wanted to see from a footballing perspective, the Matildas so close to heading to the Olympics and at the stage of choosing the squad of 18 to take with them on the journey.
The walk to the stadium with thousands of other fans was colourful. Street sellers with scarves, cool-looking bars with green and gold shirts everywhere, even some sort of igloo-style bar at the exhibition centre where the World Cup live site had been. The foot bridge across to the stadium was busy. This was like the walk to Townsville stadium a couple of years ago, a lovely sight as like-minded fans descended upon the venue en masse. A bit like Wembley Way, but much more pleasant. This was an absolutely beautiful part of the evening, and had I been going to my first ever Matildas game, this would have had me hooked already. The heavy branding for the game made us feel that we were heading into the biggest match ever, posters, signs and stickers everywhere in yellow.
Great to see Emily Condon on the Adelaide United stand. What a great initiative, enticing some of these thousands of national team fans to join the A-League Women for next season. Given the relatively early time, well before kick off, it was encouraging to see so many people flooding into the stadium. The merchandise stands were now awash with people.
Adelaide Oval is glorious. It is like Leichhardt Oval if they made it a 50,000 seater stadium. Steeped in tradition, big trees dominating, a hill in front of the stunning scoreboard where families had set out their picnic blankets, a mixture of inside and outside areas with seating and room for everyone, and vines and ivy growing where other big stadiums would simply have concrete.
The media suite was accessed via a lift only, which is always a pain in the backside if you need to be somewhere quick, and that would decide when I would head down to crowd level, if at all. The atmosphere was building in the stands, and the entrance of the players from the tunnel from the far side was quite a surprise; the normal scenario of the tunnel being down below meant that the players were already halfway over the field before I noticed. The fireworks were going off on the far side, the scene was beautiful. The national anthems were terrific, everyone in the media room standing and singing along.
I’ll not delve into the game action here, I’ve got another piece coming, but at 1-0 down at half-time, the Matildas looked out of ideas. As food arrived for the media and TV crews, I headed down to the active area to see what was happening. The core were there, enjoying the half-time atmosphere, but there was an undercurrent of disappointment with the crowd around them. Which was probably mutual. Getting from the top level of the stand down to ground level took some time, and I was still making my way back when the game kicked off.
An odd scene behind the stadium, with no one in a particular hurry to get back to their seats, massive long queues for food and coffees. I hate missing any of the game; that’s why I’m here, and that’s why I go to the football in the first place, so when I was waiting patiently for a lift that didn’t seem to want to arrive and there was loud cheering from the stadium bowl, I had that feeling of panic that I was missing something important. In the end, once I’d reached my seat, it turned out that the cheers were simply for the substitute players appearing on the big screen and I’d missed absolutely nothing. But those people in the queues for food and drink would have missed a great big chunk of the action just to satisfy their family’s craving for stadium fodder. I wish stadium food outlets could do things quicker.
The Matildas applied the pressure for the rest of the game and finally got their reward in the final minute of added time to rescue the situation. Just like in the golden age of journalism, that made for a frantic rewrite of the copy I’d put together for the Roar, and I sent that off before we headed down for the press conferences.
That damned lift held up all the journalists of both countries. Servicing the catering crew, we saw lifts come up and down filled with trolleys and the lady in charge of the media area was getting cranky that she couldn’t get an empty lift up. Luckily the press conferences wouldn’t start without journalists there, and we were in the auditorium in time for Ante Milicic and goalscorer Zhang Linyang to walk us through the Chinese viewpoint of tonight’s performance. It was well done, Milicic talking extra-clearly for translation purposes, and the team translator was swift to translate everything that was asked of the China striker and everything she replied. The main take-out was that Milicic had very little time to choose a squad after his appointment and did so over a computer. He hoped to build something like Australia is building with women’s football and he wished the Matildas all the best for the Olympics.
We then had Tameka Yallop and Tony Gustavsson, Yallop leaving half way through after fielding questions from the floor. She didn’t give much away, but the tight turnaround between games gave them a taste of the Olympic tournament schedule. They had been asked to mix things up to try and break China down and she felt that Clare Wheeler did well tonight. Gustavsson took over when Yallop left, and started by getting the usual excuses out of the way – end of the A-League season, players not having played for a while, other players fatigued. He was spot on when he said his team looked tired at half time and that they were playing too slow. On the five-player salvo after half-time, he said it was pre-planned – they would mix it up first and then bring on the regular starters. He was close to giving away too much and stopped himself when talking of Kaitlyn Torpey and Charlotte Grant swapping flanks after the break. He then commented that one or two players had locked in their spots in the squad tonight, and there were only four positions up for grabs going into this one. The players would know face-to-face if they had been selected before the end of this camp and he knew that some players would be hurt by that.
A swift mixed-zone, Ellie Carpenter revealing that the players would be first going on holiday before joining up with the squad for the Olympics, and it was time to leave. This had been quite insightful. The Olympic Games may not yet have reached the consciousness of the nation, but in the Matildas camp that’s all they’re thinking about.
The walk back along the foot bridge was quiet. The back of the Black Bull was not. The party was back on. Debrief from the Active fans was of discontent and disappointment at the goings on in the so-called active bay, but smiles were still on faces and the night had been excellent. With the bar closing, decisions were made, some of our group headed back home to end the night gracefully, whereas a few of us headed with Oscar to a superb rooftop bar where DJ Sanchez took the reins briefly to give us a taste of what the after-hours scene can give you in this party city.
After a stop in to MMTV’s pad in the fancy team hotel in town, it was time for me to exit and I headed to bed for a quick 50-minute sleep, crossing paths briefly with Michelle who was coming back in as I headed to the airport for the first flight out back to Sydney. Our gang was staying to enjoy the food and wine of South Australia, I was heading back to play football and catch up on work, although the football side of things was to quickly disappear from the agenda as the rain thrashed down on Saturday morning.
What a whirlwind trip. Great to be back in Adelaide, first time since the Brazil vs Panama game in the World Cup, and loved seeing a full stadium for my first visit to this historic venue. The Matildas have work to do ahead of the Olympic Games in Paris. Monday at Accor Stadium will see players literally playing for their spot in the squad, and I foresee a much better performance to show the nation that we are ready to face the best in July in just a few short weeks. Let’s go Matildas!