The Matildas are determined to not waste a golden alternative that’s unfolding on dwelling soil to lastly flip potential into success by turning into world champions.
Heavyweight nations proceed to fall on the FIFA Women’s World Cup, with Germany, who many predicted would win the event, the most recent main casualty in failing to succeed in the knockout levels.
The Germans, ranked No.2 world, be a part of fellow top-10 nations Canada and Brazil in bombing out within the group levels, whereas both the top-ranked workforce in world, the USA, or world No.3 Sweden, can be going dwelling after their round-of-16 assembly on Sunday.
The Matildas, who’re tenth on the planet rankings, can progress to the quarter-finals by beating Denmark (13) on Monday evening at Stadium Australia.
“As Matildas, we’ve always viewed ourselves as being in that the top end (of nations),” star defender Alanna Kennedy mentioned 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 feedback that had the Matildas not progressed out of the group levels, which was a disastrous risk after final week’s 3-2 loss to Nigeria in Brisbane, that the marketing campaign would have been a “failure”.
However. beginning as underdogs in a must-win match towards 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 mentioned.
“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, mentioned the Matildas have been doing it “for ourselves and each other” of their bid to be topped 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 mentioned.
“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.”
Source: www.news.com.au
