That figure doesn’t include those who streamed it online or the huge crowds who gathered in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth to watch it en masse. By most estimates, it was the nation’s highest-rated sporting event in a decade. The team’s semifinal match with England on Wednesday is expected to surpass the 8.8 million who watched Cathy Freeman win gold in the 400 meters at the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
However, the best measure of how profound the Matildas’ impact will be in the reaction from Australia’s other major sports. For years, soccer, men’s or women’s, has struggled to compete for both attention and revenue in an unusually rich sporting ecosystem, pales in comparison not only to cricket, the national summer game, but to a extensive winter sports, all known, somewhat unhelpfully, as “footy.”
“For a long time, the country was divided by the Barassi Line,” said Hunter Fujak, a lecturer in sports management at Deakin University. The line, named in tribute to the famous former player, coach and commentator Ron Barassi, is an imaginary, but powerful, crack. It runs from northwest to southeast, cutting Australia’s population, if not its geography, almost in half.
To the west of the line (Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Tasmania) lies Australian rules football country. Its east (Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra) is rugby territory. The latter takes two forms: rugby union, which consists of teams of 15 players and is widely considered middle class; and rugby league, the more popular and more blue collar version played with teams of 13.
Traditionally, relations between different sports – the so-called football code – were frosty. They tend to hover, in fact, somewhere between competitive and downright hostile, a phenomenon known in Australia as the code wars. The battle is a prominent enough feature of the country’s cultural landscape for Fujak to use it as the title of a book on the subject.