With Danish on his mind in the prelude to this match, Australian coach Graham Arnold had tortured an analogy about the Socceroos and icing.
So there we all were, imagining a freshly baked Danish, pretzel-shaped, topped with chocolate or pearl sugar and slivered nuts and stuffed with jam, marzipan and custard. It was going to taste as delicious as only victory at the World Cup can.
The main man: Mathew Leckie (left).Credit:Getty Images
And so it damned well does. Call it the Mathew Leckie. It will be in bakeries by the weekend. Its savour will linger on the tongue as sweetly as the goal he scored. But as Arnold had said pre-match, you need all the ingredients for the recipe to work.
Let’s be honest, the Leckie sure beats toast and Vegemite. Have it with your favourite coffee and remember the Socceroos’ best-ever win and one of the best by any national sports team. Roll that around your tongue.
The French don’t do a bad line in pastries either, as Australia was reminded in this tournament. But that was last Wednesday, eons ago. We’re level now.
To be honest, kick-off in this match also seems like a lifetime ago. The first couple of big cheers for the Australians were for tackles by Milos Degenek and Harry Souttar. It has been that sort of tournament. At first, it seemed the Danes would deal with the Australians by 1000 nicks. But only one turned into a genuine opening, Matthias Jensen’s smash saved by Mat Ryan.
The Socceroos were resolute and by the end of the half were holding their own territorially. The Danes were as on edge as the Australians and it showed. There was no premium on scoring for Australia at the time; Denmark needed to. In the back of all minds was 0-0, a pretzel-ish Danish shape.
Ten minutes into the second half, the world had changed. Tunisia had scored against France’s shadow team, Leckie had played himself into Australian soccer immortality, Denmark was trying not to play frantic football, but could not help it. They lost their shape, a football mortal sin. They played on emotion and into the Socceroos’ wheelhouse. Coach Kasper Hjulmand regretted this most post-match.
The last stanza was played out to cheers for Souttar’s headers, and goalkeeper/captain Mat Ryan’s take from a corner. Ryan can’t get a game for Copenhagen FC. Now he’ll be barred anyway.
Strains of Land Down Under and Waltzing Matilda rang out in Doha, and this time it was not in an expats bar, but a World Cup stadium.
In the group hug after beating Tunisia, Graham Arnold’s message had been that they had won nothing yet. Now they have, and so did his message. “Let’s go one more,” he urged. If they’d heard it in Fed Square, they’d have shouted: “Encore.”
Some context, not for sobriety’s sake. Australia’s World Cup goals are necessarily interim and modest. As a nation, we’ve had to condition ourselves to this. A place in the World Cup finals, a goal, a win, “getting out of the group”. That’s a humble phrase that’s taken on the guise of a grail.
Winning two games in a row, getting out of the group more than once, getting out of the group in style, knocking off top 10 opposition: Tick them all off. All this night. Actually, sobriety can take a back seat, even in Doha.
Mathew Leckie fires the ball out of the reach of Danish keeper Kasper Schmeichel.Credit:Getty Images
Australia has no hope of winning the World Cup, so it has to be about winning at the World Cup. To be fair, that’s true for about two-thirds of the countries here. The world game is ever-broadening, but its summit remains unreachably high. So this is already a deceptively worthy achievement. Who would dare to predict what comes next?
Maybe this, that there’s a new minimum threshold. Australia’s accomplishments in its World Cup history arrive so far apart that each new assault feels like starting again. That’s how it felt to Arnold when he took the reins after the last World Cup in 2018.
We’re Sisyphus, always back at the bottom. And pinned there. Arnold tacitly admitted this when he read the world’s media a short tutorial on the hierarchy of football codes in Australia.
It means that Arnold’s right when he says that the Socceroos and Matildas are the only teams to unite the nation – we love nothing more than to disport ourselves on the world stage – but he’s also right that they do it on a base as thin as icing. Australia as a nation overplays the underdog card, but in the case of the Socceroos, it is apt.
All tournament, Arnold has preached a message so simple it sounded simplistic. One team, Australian DNA, you know the drill. He’ll hate this, but it was the message of an old-fashioned AFL coach. On the world stage, it sounded too thin, overcooked.
What would mere kitchen hands know?
Arnold’s Socceroos took the cake. For all they knew, 0-0 would have been enough, but that’s not how they played it – nor how it played out after Tunisia stunned France. Instead, they won by winning. The scoreline was the icing.
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