Asian Cup: tough draw for Matildas, but chance to banish ghosts of India | OneFootball

As Tameka Yallop unfurled the purple scroll revealing the Matildas’ final group-stage opponent for next year’s Asian Cup, whispers rustled across the Sydney Town Hall crowd.

South Korea. The same team that had knocked them out of the quarter-final of this tournament almost four years ago. The game that plunged Australian football fans and media into despair.

Memories of India came rushing back. Furious calls for head coach sackings underlined widespread astonishment and growing concern over the direction of the team with a World Cup on the horizon.

The Matildas were, after all, close to full-strength then. Sam Kerr and Caitlin Foord were reaching their attacking peaks, Mary Fowler was emerging as Australia’s newest star, Ellie Carpenter and Steph Catley were at their flying wing-back best, Lydia Williams was still Australia’s No 1 goalkeeper.

They were expected to win the Asian Cup in 2022. Do we feel the same way now?

Australia is a very different team to what they were the last time they competed for this trophy. Their fundamental core has shifted. Injuries and retirements have forced the side to figure out the next version of themselves, and nobody is quite sure what it looks like yet.

Partly because the past 12 months under interim coach Tom Sermanni, the last coach to win this tournament for Australia back in 2010, was a year of stasis. With Football Australia taking far too long to appoint a successor to Tony Gustavsson, the team wasted several windows trotting out their tired senior players for friendlies when they should have been blooding the next generation instead.

So who are the Matildas now? They’ve lost some older players, gained some newer ones. The form of some key figureheads – Kerr, Fowler, Katrina Gorry – remains uncertain. The team’s recent performances haven’t been convincing. Are they any better or any worse than they were four years ago? Just how quickly has Asia improved around them?

Joe Montemurro, who took charge of his first camp earlier this month, now has just three windows left to figure it out. And they will have the hot spotlight of the nation upon them as they try to solve their past problems against the hardest group of the tournament.

Their opening match against the Philippines in Perth on 1 March may seem like an easy one on paper. Australia have won all their previous matches, including an 8-0 drubbing in October 2023.

But this is a nation with a plan: led by Australian Mark Torcaso, the Filipinas are full of international diaspora, particularly from the USA college system. Their gallant World Cup performances, an ever-improving youth pipeline, and a large fan community could prove trickier than anticipated.

Iran, too – the lowest-ranked side in the group – are no push-overs. While the Matildas have met them just once, Iran defended brilliantly and kept them to just a 2-0 win. Their defeat of rising Asian nation, Jordan, in the final round of qualifiers shows a side steadily improving, and knowing Australia’s age-old struggle to break down deep-lying defensive teams, could pose a problem.

But it’s South Korea that will cause the most concern. Never mind that the Matildas defeated them in two friendlies back in April; tournament football is a different fight, and South Korea, who reached the final in 2022 before losing to China, know how to grind through them. The shadow of India will stretch across this must-win group game.

South Korea is also a nation that is moving on. Just three of their most recent call-ups have had over 100 caps, while half their current squad is aged below 25. That includes 21-year-old striker Jeon Yu-Gyeong, who stood alongside the 34-year-old Yallop on stage at last night’s draw. Two players representing two very different moments for their national teams.

Australia aren’t without their glimpses of the future, though. Amy Sayer, Winonah Heatley, Teagan Micah, Charlie Grant, Jamilla Rankin and Holly McNamara have all begun to show their qualities in the vacuum of senior stars.

And squad depth – as we’ve seen in the recent Women’s Euro – could be critical to topping the group, thus avoiding some of Asia’s biggest nations until World Cup qualification (which this tournament doubles as for the final time) is secured in the semi-finals.

But with time slipping away and the Matildas’ older core needing to reintegrate following a period of directionless wandering, is there enough time to do what needs to be done?

Next year’s Asian Cup will be a lot of things. A television spectacle, a commercial achievement, a moment in sporting history. It will also be a crucial litmus test; a chance to see just how far the Matildas have come – or, if the ghosts of their past still haunt them, how much further they have to go.

Header image: [Photograph: Dan Himbrechts/EPA]