Toot-toot: All aboard the Socceroos bandwagon, diehards and all

June 13, 2026 — 6:00am

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Whenever there’s a FIFA World Cup, we have a bandwagon and the bandwagon has a caboose.

The bandwagon is our Aussie team, the Socceroos or Matildas, and toot-toot, all aboard.

This is irritating for the all-year-every-year diehard fan, who finds their niche interest, the Australian football team that they’re normally able to follow with the luxury of legroom and spare seats to either side, is now as jam-packed as the Homebush train on game night.

It is what it is. Among the “Australian values” on our citizenship test is that 25-plus million of us become Socceroos tragics for a couple of weeks every fourth year, and then magically transform back to normal indifference as the bandwagon empties.

The caboose is more interesting. Who’s your second team? Who did you draw in the office sweep? Put another way, who are you cheering for to actually win the World Cup?

In constructing an idiot’s guide for dummies and a bluffer’s guide for fools, there are pluses and minuses wherever you look. This is the world we live in.

As in the past two World Cups, Les Bleus are the team with the panache, esprit, savoir faire, joie de vivre and je ne sais quoi.

Their captain, Kylian Mbappe, while frustratingly inconsistent at club level, ascends to an astral plane at World Cups.

This year’s team is so representative of today’s multicultural France, it only has one player with French ancestry, so if it wins, it’s a direct challenge to all those incredibly big-IQ American leaders who say that immigration is sending Europe to hell, and is also a........

© Brisbane Times