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It began with footprints.
Darkish patterns pressed into purple earth. A path of scuffs and swirls sculpted into heat sand.
Lydia Williams, a younger Aboriginal child, operating barefoot by way of the deserts of Western Australia, a ball in her palms, leaving a mark — her mark — with each step she took.
It is a reminiscence that the Matildas’ veteran goalkeeper has returned to rather a lot lately. As retirement has slowly edged over her horizon, Williams has spent the previous whereas trying again throughout her life, interested by its small beginnings, and simply how a lot larger and brighter issues have develop into.
Over her 19-year Matildas profession, Williams has seen and completed greater than what most of us may ever dream of, crisscrossing the globe and competing for her nation in additional main tournaments than virtually another footballer Australia has produced.
In the middle of doing so, as she has launched into that journey outward, she has additionally slowly travelled inward, discovering and rediscovering herself, shaping herself into the individual she needs to be.
That course of began some time in the past when she first started to offer form to the sensation that perhaps her sky was rising darker, the tip of her Matildas profession peering over the lip of the longer term.
And so, in preparation to step ahead, she stepped backwards; returning to the sands of her childhood for a documentary concerning the Matildas that got here out earlier than the 2023 Ladies’s World Cup, and for a e-book she wrote about it referred to as Saved!!!, which was not about what she did in soccer a lot as what soccer did for her.
Footprints was the place it started for “the child that grew up within the desert and fell in love with soccer,” strolling right into a sport that desperately wanted somebody to hold it ahead, and who now walks out of it having introduced it someplace not even she imagined was attainable, leaving a path that generations of gamers will now observe.
Having began her profession in 2005, Williams was a part of ladies’s soccer when ladies’s soccer had nothing.
Her first sport, a 3-0 loss towards South Korea, obtained such little protection that it barely exists within the official document, its significance stored alive largely by way of the minds and mementos of those that had been there.
Her reminiscences of that match are of thundering rain and the pressure of her calves after being compelled to face up within the dressing room as a result of they’d no chairs to sit down on.
There are plenty of reminiscences like that. Returning to Australia after profitable the nation’s first-ever Asian Cup trophy in 2010, solely to discover a handful of family and friends, and perhaps a digicam or two, ready for them on the airport.
Standing in entrance of a bundle of microphones in 2015, saying that the Matildas can be occurring strike — the primary collective motion ever taken by a ladies’s nationwide sports activities workforce in Australia — to protest the shortage of monetary assist and contract safety from Soccer Federation Australia.
Leaping from membership to membership, continent to continent, and seeing that very same lack of all the pieces in every single place: cash, employees, services, gear, fields, followers, media, care, assist, perception.
How should she really feel now, peering up into the sold-out stands of Stadium Australia, the Matildas’ fifteenth consecutive sold-out sport on dwelling soil, her title emblazoned on the backs of purple goalkeeper jerseys sprinkled all through the ocean of yellow and inexperienced, trying again in any respect that? Seeing the footprints that led her right here?
Possibly she went to that place once more, when the roar of 76,000 folks fell silent as she was wrapped in a cloak fabricated from purple kangaroo pores and skin, the cheers and applause giving strategy to the chirps of cicadas and a gently crackling fireplace and the sand between her toes.
“It is actually loopy simply to see the drive and assist of the ladies’s sport,” she mentioned the day earlier than their 2-0 win over China on Monday.
“The trajectory within the final 12 months, in how we have grown the sport… we had been reminiscing again right here, Tony [Gustavsson’s] first time enjoying right here was towards the USA and it was 35,000 [people], and we had been stoked about that. And that is solely actually two years in the past.
“It is a credit score to everybody concerned doing that, however from that, it is our efficiency on the pitch, it is how we put together, it is how we get a very powerful provides and issues that we want for us.
“The one factor that I actually wished was that this workforce fights for what they imagine in, and we have seen that, all through the years, it is okay to combat for issues and to have that assist.
“The Matildas as an entire: it is not only one participant, it is not only one employees member, it is not only one organisation. It is all the pieces. The Matildas are the followers, a household, and everybody in between. I believe we have seen that develop all through this final 12 months.”
Williams, together with Australia’s most-capped footballer Clare Polkinghorne, are the final two remnants of a time previous; a time when no one knew what a “Matilda” was or why they mattered.
A veteran of 5 World Cups, six Asian Cups, and two (doubtlessly three) Olympic Video games throughout 104 appearances for her workforce, Williams’ impression on the sector is troublesome to overstate.
She was the workforce’s custodian throughout their gradual awakening within the public consciousness from 2017 when the Matildas started to beat the world-beaters and develop the “by no means say die” motto that’s now part of their literal and figurative material.
She was a part of the outdated guard who helped usher by way of this thrilling new “golden era” of gamers, making certain they stayed related to the Matildas of the previous, residing and enjoying with the identical values and beliefs of inclusion and respect that the workforce now radiates.
And he or she did it as one of many Matildas’ many First Nations ladies, a historical past that extends all the way in which again to its first formative groups, representing one verse in an extended tune of pioneering Aboriginal ladies athletes whose very visibility carried, and continues to hold, its personal form of significance, its personal form of legacy.
That legacy was introduced full circle on Monday night time when, in entrance of a record-breaking crowd on the similar stadium the place Cathy Freeman ran that race, Evonne Goolagong-Cawley emerged from the guard of honour to current Williams with a specially-made Booka – a cloak – fabricated from the skins of Williams’ totem: 4 purple desert kangaroos.
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Designed by Western Australian artist Lea Taylor, who already had deep connections to the Williams household such that she personally knew Williams’ dad, Ron, the Booka featured designs symbolising Lydia’s identification, household, and nation.
There have been kangaroo prints for herself, and crow’s ft and river rocks for her dad.
There have been kangaroo paw flowers and banksia pods for the place she grew up within the deserts close to Kalgoorlie, and golden wattle for the nation she represented in every single place.
There was an engraving of the hills of Canberra, the place her soccer profession started, and of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, the place it is going to all come to an finish.
She had no concept it was going to occur. She thought it will be some small ceremony; a video on the display. Which is the form of modesty and humbleness that somebody who nonetheless remembers what it was wish to don’t have anything.
However to have Goolagong-Cawley, a reported Matildas super-fan, wrap it round her shoulders “was most likely the second that tipped me over, emotion-wise,” she mentioned afterwards.
“It was a beautiful second. I believe plenty of sporting ladies in Australia simply need to depart the sport higher than once they first arrived in it, and do not most likely realise the impression of how they’ve formed the tradition of not solely ladies’s sport but additionally Australian sport.
“To obtain that from such an icon — a legend of tennis — is simply completely, actually humbling. An Indigenous lady that is represented the nation and her tradition and completed a lot … and to share that second as Indigenous ladies in entrance of a packed stadium of people who fell in love with soccer.
“Yeah, that was fairly particular.”
Simply earlier than half-time, Williams gave manner for Mackenzie Arnold, her predecessor, the Matildas’ subsequent custodian, the pair sharing a protracted hug – “a second of respect and admiration for one another, of the place we each got here from and the place we at the moment are” – on the sidelines.
Monday night time was, as she had mentioned a day earlier, “a closing of the circle”.
For the remainder of us, it was not nearly saying farewell to a workforce as they embark on their Olympic journey in a number of weeks’ time, however about saying goodbye to this individual, this participant, with out whom the Matildas is probably not the place they’re in any respect.
Simply because it began with footprints, it ended with footprints.
These embroidered within the Booka that Goolagong-Cawley hugged round her shoulders.
Those who she left imprinted within the grass of the stadium the place Cathy Freeman ran.
Those who she created as she walked off the pitch for the ultimate time, leaving a path for generations of footballers to observe.
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