Tonight’s match can be a very particular one for goalkeeper Lydia Williams, who introduced earlier this 12 months that she can be retiring from the nationwide crew after an unbelievable 19-year profession with the Matildas.
It’s troublesome to overstate simply how essential Williams has been to the expansion of ladies’s soccer in Australia. She’s been the nation’s longest-serving goalkeeper ever (males or ladies), making it to 5 Women’s World Cups, six Asian Cups, and two Olympics since her first senior cap in 2005.
Behind the scenes, Williams has additionally been an unbelievable advocate for rising the ladies’s sport, particularly in her capability with the gamers’ union, Professional Footballers Australia (PFA), which she is the Vice President of.
But she’s 36 years previous now, and her physique is breaking down. An ankle harm put a untimely finish to her most up-to-date A-League Women season with Melbourne Victory, and has accepted that there are goalkeepers coming in behind her that she now wants to create space for.
“I’m just at that point where I’ve sacrificed everything for football and it’s given me so much, and it’s time that I let it be open for the next group,” she instructed the Sydney Morning Herald.
“It would be selfish for me to try to hold on as much as I can when it’s past my time. Mentally, I can keep going. But physically, the demands of modern-day football now are so much more than when I first began, and my body just can’t continue.
“I talked with the girls, and talked with my mum and family and friends, because they’ve been the ones who have copped me missing out on things and putting them second.
“When they gave the all clear, it was an easy decision to put someone else first for a change. I don’t really want to picture my last game with the girls because we’ve been through so much together, but it has to happen.”
This can be her final sport on dwelling soil, and he or she can be honoured not simply with a begin between the sticks for the ultimate time in entrance of her dwelling followers, but additionally a particular ceremony earlier than the match by one other First Nations legend of Australian sport.
And her Matildas team-mates have honoured her in their very own little means, all of them sporting “Williams 1” warm-up shirts earlier than the match.
You can learn a bit extra about Lydia’s story in this feature story I wrote about her before last year’s World Cup, from rising up in the deserts of Kalgoorlie to rising with Canberra United to travelling the world, solely to return proper again to the place it began as she tried to reconnect together with her nation and herself.
Do you will have any lasting reminiscences of Lydia Williams? Log in and share them so we will all have a bit of cry collectively.