‘The lights turned on and there she was’: Freeman surprises and inspires Matildas

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Last Wednesday, two days before the Matildas’ friendly against France, Tony Gustavsson scheduled a 6.30pm meeting. The players assumed it was another tactics session. Except that when they arrived and sat down, their coach told them they were doing something a little different this time.

He turned off the lights, and a big screen lit up with a three-minute highlights reel of Cathy Freeman’s 400m final at the Sydney Olympics, and then the history-defining moment she paraded around Stadium Australia with the Aboriginal flag draped around her neck.

Cathy Freeman provided some inspiration for the Matildas last week.Credit: Getty

“By the end of it there was a lot of emotion going around in the room,” Matildas veteran Aivi Luik said on Tuesday from Australia’s camp in Brisbane. “And when they turned the lights on, we turned around and there she was. It was a huge surprise to us. A lot of girls were very emotional.”

The 50-year-old Freeman, who is media-shy and rarely speaks in public, sat down with the players informally, answering questions and imparting wisdom about self-belief and keeping it together under the scarcely imaginable weight of home expectation.

“She’s such a down to-earth girl, she’s amazing,” Luik said. “We had a chat to her and talked about how she dealt with pressures because, obviously, she had the weight of the nation on her shoulders. And she was just one – we’re a whole team, so we’re quite lucky in that regard.

“We just sat around. We asked her questions informally, and she spoke back to us just like she was a friend. We got a lot of good insight from that and came away feeling a little bit of a weight off our shoulders, and just completely inspired.”

Sam Kerr is in the spotlight more than any other player at this World Cup.Credit: Getty Images

Australia will have its eyes collectively on the women’s football team over the coming weeks. Sam Kerr in particular is smack bang in the middle of the spotlight. It is arguable that, not since Freeman 23 years ago, has there been so much pressure on an Australian athlete to perform in front of a home crowd.

“My takeaway from what she told us was that we know who we are, we know why we do this,” Luik said. “And while we want to perform and give results for others outside the circle, at the end of the day you believe in yourself and you do it for yourself.

“All athletes do what they do because they love the sport. She told us to not lose track of that, and that gives you the confidence to go out there and do your job.”

Football Australia had planned the special moment for some time, aware that Freeman’s indelible stamp on the Australian sporting psyche had also left a lasting impression on Matildas players. Older members in the current squad were either children or early teenagers when the 2000 Games were held, and many of those have cited it as the defining moment of their adolescence.

In Kerr’s recently released book, the striker describes the sprinter “as the only sportswoman role model I had when I was growing up”

“I loved her so much,” she wrote. “She was so fast and strong, and she coped so well with the unbelievable pressure that was put on her. I watched her race in the Sydney 2000 Olympics over and over and over again. It was an amazing moment in sporting history.”

“A couple of years ago, we were going through some questions about who your sporting hero is and why, and over half the team said that Cathy Freeman was their hero,” Luik said. “I’d come to find out later that, because of that, the staff tried to get her in. And bless her heart, she came in. She doesn’t do a lot of public speaking, but she did that for us. So a big thank you to Cathy and her family for doing that.”

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