Matildas provide rare moment of joy in a sport that keeps sinking to new lows

March 20, 2026 — 6:33pm

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The redemption arc for Sam Kerr’s Matildas is not quite complete, but making the final of the women’s Asian Cup on Saturday night in Sydney is, in many ways, as good as a win.

Australia are outsiders for the match against Japan. The Matildas have jagged their way to the final in spite of being dominated in their last three matches.

A last-minute draw with South Korea was as bad as a loss, because it put Australia in a quarter-final with North Korea, described by Joe Montemurro as the best team in the tournament.

North Korea won the quarter-final everywhere but on the scoreboard, missing countless chances while Australia took their couple. A similar, if less one-sided, pattern unfolded in the semi-final with China.

But that’s football, and Kerr’s uncanny ability to score from limited opportunities has put Australia where they are. Further, there will be a section of the public who think that Kerr also had to make amends after the events leading to her criminal trial in London last year.

Others think, having been acquitted, she had nothing to apologise for. But her reputation did suffer, and if a sportsperson can redeem herself through her actions on and off the field, Kerr has done so amply in this Asian Cup.

Likewise, the Matildas have partially revived the fever that came and went in the 2023 Women’s FIFA World Cup.

Since those heady nights when they became the most-followed and most-loved Australian national sporting team, the Tillies have suffered from a succession of poor results, coaching changes and the unfillable vacuum of Kerr’s 20-month injury break.

Their Asian Cup progress, if scrappy, has reminded Australia of its fortune in being able to watch and be inspired by this generation of world-class players.

We can also be confident that whoever wins the final, we won’t get anything like the infamous behaviour of Spain’s erstwhile football president Luis Rubiales, whose unwelcome advances on the public podium set off a scandalous aftermath and a culture war that ended up staining that event.

Who’d have thought a male football official could have done so much to undo the joy that the game itself had created?

But international football, like a Mafioso turning up every Sunday for confession, is always needing redemption. Given the dark politics of the world game, you could throw a dart at almost any year and hit a nest of corruption and malfeasance. But 2026 has been a new low.

The sycophancy of Gianni Infantino’s creation of a FIFA Peace Prize for Donald Trump is just a prelude to the coming ghastliness of this year’s World Cup, which the USA will turn into a provincial pageant reminiscent of the 1936 Berlin and the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

For a global event to sink as low as the 2026 World Cup will do is already stomach-turning.

‘Given the dark politics of the world game, you could throw a dart at almost any year and hit a nest of corruption and malfeasance.’

But the nadir of 2026 might have already taken place in Africa, and it had nothing to do with Trump.

This week, Morocco was handed the men’s AFCON (previously the Africa Cup of Nations) title after a court appeal against its defeat by Senegal in Rabat in January.

The overturning of Senegal’s 1-0 win – Morocco have now been given a fictitious 3-0 victory – was described by Abdoulaye Seydou Sow, secretary general of the Senegalese Football Federation, as “shame for Africa”.

Of course, he’d be biased. But he also speaks for every non-Moroccan football follower outside Infantino’s cabal.

Even a capsule of the story takes a bit of telling. Morocco, which will co-host the 2030 FIFA World Cup, had not won the AFCON since 1976. Hosts this year, semi-finalists at the 2022 World Cup, Morocco has gone on a football-driven economic redevelopment and is understandably fixated on the sport.

Winning the 2026 AFCON was seen as their entitlement. Unease from the rest of Africa grew throughout the tournament as Morocco benefited from questionable officiating to reach the final. In the big match, this trend continued.

Ball boys and Moroccan reserves interfered with the Senegalese players, for example, repeatedly stealing goalkeeper Edouard Mendy’s towel.

Senegal appeared to score a winner in the 92nd minute, but it was disallowed on highly debatable grounds.

These shenanigans couldn’t steal the match for Morocco until the eighth minute of added time when the referee gave them a dodgy penalty. Senegal had finally had enough; their players walked off.

Fifteen minutes of negotiations finally brought them back on for the expected coup de grace.

Comically, Morocco’s Brahim Diaz’s “panenka” spot-kick lobbed harmlessly into Mendy’s arms.

In extra time, a scintillating Senegalese team movement was finished by Papa Gueye. One brilliant moment of football appeared to have salvaged the event, though Infantino could not persuade Morocco’s crown prince Moulay Rachid to actually give Senegal the cup.

And now, two months later, what was already described by ESPN as “among the most unsavoury, unedifying nights in African football history” has taken another turn, with Infantino’s grubby fingerprints all over it. Morocco have their cup, though Senegal have announced an appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport.

The women’s Asian Cup is only on the margins of the spiralling corruption of world football, but it has taken one step forward for the game’s dozens of steps back.

It has been a competitive, relatively harmonious and well-run event with good games every day and night.

‘I told you so’: The sight that brought this former Matildas captain to tears

I often think there is a condescension underneath the common praise for the refreshing, good spirit of women’s international sport.

The praise carries an undertone that women are less competitive than men and that the stakes are somehow lower, both of which are manifestly untrue.

But that being said, FIFA’s endemic cynicism and the political hot mess of men’s international football has not infected the women’s game to anywhere near the same extent, and we can be thankful for that.

When the US Olympic women’s ice hockey team refused to kiss Trump’s hem, he declared that nobody cares about women’s sport. He was wrong then, and he’s wrong this Saturday night.

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