The Matildas are desperate not to waste a golden opportunity that’s unfolding on home soil to finally turn potential into success by becoming world champions.
Heavyweight nations continue to fall at the FIFA Women’s World Cup, with Germany, who many predicted would win the tournament, the latest major casualty in failing to reach the knockout stages.
The Germans, ranked No.2 world, join fellow top-10 nations Canada and Brazil in bombing out in the group stages, while either the top-ranked team in world, the USA, or world No.3 Sweden, will be going home after their round-of-16 meeting on Sunday.
The Matildas, who are 10th in the world rankings, can progress to the quarter-finals by beating Denmark (13) on Monday night at Stadium Australia.
“As Matildas, we’ve always viewed ourselves as being in that the top end (of nations),” star defender Alanna Kennedy said on Friday.
“We’ve done everything but we’re yet to win anything. We have done so many things as a group, we’ve beaten so many teams ranked above us and played such good football, but it’s about winning something.
“We’re just taking each step as it comes with the vision of winning the World Cup at the end, but that’s still so far away.
“We still have so many things before we get to that game, and our focus is purely on this Denmark game.”
Kennedy agreed with coach Tony Gustavsson’s comments that had the Matildas not progressed out of the group stages, which was a disastrous possibility after last week’s 3-2 loss to Nigeria in Brisbane, that the campaign would have been a “failure”.
However. starting as underdogs in a must-win match against Canada, the Australians lifted to thrash the Olympic champions 4-0 in Melbourne.
“We knew what was on the line in the Canada game, and there was a lot of outside noise,” Kennedy said.
“People love to jump on the bandwagon when we’re doing well, and love to criticise when we’re not, so there were lot of points we wanted to prove, but for us, it was more about the fact that we believe in ourselves as a squad.
“So many people are hard on us, but we’re the hardest on ourselves, so for us it was about playing to our potential and being the team that we know we can be.
“Moving forward, we have to play like that every single game.”
Real Madrid-bound attacker Hayley Raso, the two-goal hero in Australia’s demolition of the Canadians, said the Matildas were doing it “for ourselves and each other” in their bid to be crowned world champions.
“After losing that game (to Nigeria), we got ourselves really fired up, really motivated, And really focus because we knew what was at stake and that we needed to win (against Canada),” Raso said.
“We didn’t feel any pressure from the outside because we’ve kept everything tight within the circle, but we knew that we needed to do it for each other.
“We’ve been blocking out that noise and just focusing on what we can do, but it was nice, after losing that game, to come out and show everyone what you can do by winning big the way we did.”