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Are these the ‘First Matildas?’ Football Australia rewrites history with 1975 caps

Are these the ‘First Matildas?’ Football Australia rewrites history with 1975 caps

In 1975, a women’s football team from Australia travelled to Hong Kong to take part in an international tournament that has since been recognised as the first-ever women’s Asian Cup.

They competed under the Australian coat of arms, wore hand-me-down uniforms given to them by the Socceroos, and faced the national teams from five other countries: New Zealand, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Singapore.

They finished third and won a bronze medal in front of over 10,000 spectators.

But despite looking like a national team, sounding like a national team, and competing like a national team, this group has never been formally recognised by Football Australia (FA) as the first official Matildas side.

Why?

Australia lining up with opposition teams at the 1975 Women’s Asian Cup in Hong Kong.(SBS.)

In 2022, a panel of historians was convened by FA to figure it out.

That panel concluded that, unlike the other nations they faced in Hong Kong, this 1975 team was not chosen through a national selection process organised by its governing body. Instead, all but two of the players came from the same club — St George Budapest — who, throughout the early 1970s, were one of the most successful women’s club teams in NSW.

Their formal participation in the Hong Kong tournament was also complicated. At the time, women’s soccer in Australia was run by the Australian Women’s Soccer Association (AWSA), but they did not have the authority to sanction any international activity in terms of overseas competitions.

Instead, that power fell to the Australian Soccer Federation (ASF), the governing body who separately ran the men’s game and had no knowledge of or input into the women’s ecosystem.

So when the Asian Ladies Football Confederation (ALFC) reached out to Australia in 1974 to participate in their Hong Kong tournament the following year, the invitation was first received by Pat O’Connor, who was the secretary of the AWSA at the time — as well as the captain of the St George Budapest team.