When does a sporting fixture shift from a simple competition to a deep-rooted rivalry?
At what point does a meeting between two teams, be they national or domestic, begin to mean something more than a date scratched in a calendar?
Who gets to decide when a game against one team means more than a game against any other?
As Australia prepares to face England in tonight’s Women’s World Cup semifinal, there has been a lot of talk about rivalries: about how this game lengthens the feud that these two nations have contested across multiple sports, seemingly for as long as the sports themselves have existed.
The cricket, the rugby and the netball have all been painted with this big brush, where teams are used as a metaphor for the deeper political and cultural threads that have tied their countries together for hundreds of years.
So much of our national identities, it seems, have been written into — and out of — the ways that our teams compete against one another in these moments.
The English, on the one hand, are the old world: the originals, the prim-and-proper adults. The Australians, meanwhile, are the new world: the remix, the rough-and-tumble kids.
No matter how results and success have see-sawed between them over the years, that collective sense of self as sporting nations relative to one another has rarely, if ever, wavered.
And yet, when it comes to tonight’s game, this dusty old jacket of a rivalry sits awkwardly on both of these bright, young teams.
At the pre-match media conferences on Tuesday, the head coaches of Australia and England and select players were repeatedly asked to reflect on “the rivalry” that exists between the Matildas and the Lionesses, and the line that can be drawn to their bigger (overwhelmingly male) sporting histories.
None, however, did.
How could they? When it comes to these two national teams, the line is barely there.
Australia and England have played each other just six times in women’s football, with tonight’s encounter the first at a World Cup.
Aside from a friendly back in April, from which the Matildas emerged 2-0 winners, their last game came all the way back in 2021 at the Tokyo Olympics, where Australia beat Team GB (which was basically England plus two Scottish players) in the quarterfinal 4-3.
So scant have the meetings been between these two countries that Lionesses head coach Sarina Wiegman didn’t even know a rivalry existed.
When she asked her staff to teach her about the bigger story, she simply told the room of journalists: “We didn’t feel that rivalry that much. The main thing is there’s a lot of rivalry in rugby, in cricket, in netball … it just means it’s a very competitive game.”
“Not really, no,” answered England captain Millie Bright when asked whether the rivalry has been reignited.
“For me, rivalry is a big thing, but you can have it with any opponent: they can beat you and you can beat them. But, ultimately, it’s a game of football and we want to execute and play the best game, a brilliant game for people to watch.”
It was the same for Matildas goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold, who immediately popped the hot-air balloon being inflated by the expectant journalists below her.
“Obviously there’s a massive rivalry between Australia and England in sports all over the place,” she said, “but at the same time, we have a lot of rivalries in football with Brazil, the USA, New Zealand.
“I think tomorrow is going to be just another game … we’re trying to focus on one game at a time and focus on ourselves and our own gameplan rather than getting caught up in the rivalry.”
It makes sense that these two teams don’t feel “the rivalry” as what many perhaps expect, primarily because the rivalry everyone talks about, and the history that has generated it, isn’t theirs.
As the examples like the 2003 Rugby World Cup or the Ashes that were offered in the media conference showed, these are narratives that have been written and transplanted from elsewhere: by and for men’s sport. Indeed, so all-encompassing have these narratives become that it seems there is barely enough space for women’s teams to develop their own.
But that is exactly what makes this Women’s World Cup — and in particular, this semifinal — so special: it has become the page upon which these teams are now able to write their own stories, to create the kinds of myths that have shaped men’s sport for generations
“The history of men’s sports is uninterrupted mythmaking,” writes journalist and author Kate Fagan, “the kind through which momentum is created.”
She argues that women’s sport has a “much quicker half-life”, with “preservation” being the challenge now facing female athletes – “which will lead, over time, to mythicisation”.
This Women’s World Cup feels different precisely because we are seeing this preservation, and its subsequent myth-making, in action.
Millions upon millions have witnessed the Matildas’ run to the final four for the first time, Colombia’s extraordinary rise, the downfall of titans like the USA and Germany, the rise of Africa and Asia and the Caribbean, generating millions upon millions of words, images, videos, and material objects that document them and them alone.
This tournament feels unprecedented precisely because this moment, these stories, are theirs; they are not shaped by concepts or comparisons from other places or other times.
This World Cup is a tournament, a collection of teams, and a community of players that have finally been given the chance to step out from the shadow that the men’s game has cast over them for the past century, allowing them to write the first chapters of the myths that nations, years from now, will recall in moments like tonight.
And rather than two old, bitter rivals hardened by time, coming into this game Australia and England, instead, feel like comrades: collaborators in a shared mission that extends far beyond the 90-plus minutes we’re likely to see.
Both have been the home team embarking on a dream run deep into a major tournament they’re hosting: England with last year’s Women’s European Champions, Australia with the World Cup.
Both have felt the belief of a nation catching in their sails and propelling them onwards. Both know how important it is to play for something more, to leave a bigger legacy, and have seen that legacy unfold before their very eyes.
“It’s a proud moment for the women’s game where people turn on the TV back home and you see the incredible atmosphere we’ve created,” Bright said.
“The environment’s different, the women’s game is different, teams, players. The past is the past, we can influence the future, and I think it’s important to stay present on the task ahead.
“Credit to Australia for selling out the stadium and creating that atmosphere because, like we always know, the women’s game is always on a journey, but what a place to be!”
So while the rivalry chat may continue, and while tonight’s game may be folded into the folklore that both Australia and England have generated about themselves and each other in the history of sport, beneath the surface of this match is a deep and unwavering commitment by both teams to the shared task ahead: not just the 90-plus minutes in front of them, but every mythological minute that comes after it.
“The legacy we wanted to leave throughout this World Cup was to inspire the generation coming through,” Arnold said.
“I think we’ve done more than that; we’ve done more than what we would accomplish.
“Obviously we’re not done yet, but to see the reaction we’ve received from the whole country has been absolutely unreal. I think this is only the beginning; there’s much more to come.”
