‘I’ve sacrificed everything’: Lydia Williams to retire from Matildas

Lydia Williams’ late father could play the gum leaf. This is not really relevant to her Matildas career, but it also is in a roundabout way.

Pastor (uncle) Ron Williams, one of Australia’s most respected Aboriginal elders, did not live to see the daughter he and her mother raised on the red dirt of Kalgoorlie play football for her country. But he did get to watch her as a young teenager representing Canberra Eclipse in the now-defunct Women’s National Soccer League. And he did rally the other parents into a touchline chant during an away trip to Coffs Harbour.

“Dad loved being creative,” Williams says. “He could play the gum leaf, and he loved singing songs and telling me stories. He loved making banners and anything on canvas. He made this canvas that he drove to Coffs Harbour, and he put it up during the game. And then I remember he was there with Ellie Brush’s dad, Paul, and all the other parents, and he made up a chant that went ‘come on girls, let us roll, we can get another goal’. I was like ‘freaking geez, this is crazy’.”

Ron, a Noongar man and member of the Stolen Generation who married an American accountant, died from cancer in 2003, when Williams was 15 years old. Among the 800 who attended his memorial at the Great Hall of Parliament House were the Tent Embassy – and, unexpectedly, her Eclipse teammates.

“They didn’t know my dad, but these older women came to support me just because I was on their team,” she says. “I was still in school, so I wasn’t having coffee or hanging out with them after training – I was at home doing my homework. That was pretty significant because I had really no idea about the sense of family and community they had experienced during their time playing for Australia.

“Then when I started making the Matildas, and went into camp and felt a sense of family there, it was like ‘oh wow, this is really helping my sadness’. It really was a place where they care more than just what we were doing on the field.”

Williams recalls this now, as she announces her international retirement, because memories of her dad making tunes with the gum leaf, and chanting, and showing her that bush “fine dining” is hunting goanna and kangaroo and biting into the butt sacs of honey ants, are actually pretty relevant to her Matildas career after all. Because the Matildas gave her a place to put her grief, and she gave the Matildas their longest-serving player.

Two decades, 103 caps, five World Cups and six Asian Cups later, the 35-year-old will bid farewell to the national team after her third Olympics this year in Paris. By then she will be 36. And, though goalkeepers have been known to push their careers out up to several years longer, her body is giving signs her time has come.

“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 says. “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.”

Football Australia will celebrate Williams in an official capacity in the lead-up to the Paris Games. Quite what she decides to do with her No.1 jersey is, apparently, a secret for now.

What we already know is that Williams, who became a goalkeeper by accident after moving with her parents to Canberra as an 11-year-old, has morphed from a long-limbed (“scrawny”) and shy but talented teenager into a world-class athlete and one of the Matildas’ enduring figures.

Williams, and her 2007 World Cup contemporary Clare Polkinghorne, have been around since the older generation and have also seen in the new. And if Polkinghorne is the most-capped of them all, the fact that a goalkeeper has made an international century is close to unheard of and “a personal highlight”. So too are the stark changes she has witnessed in women’s football.

Her first cap for Australia – a loss to South Korea as a 15-year-old in 2005 – was spent standing in the dressing room at half-time because there weren’t any chairs. Her early national team camp days were almost always at the Australian Institute of Sport and the squad counted themselves lucky for what they were given, watching as the then world leaders such as the United States, Germany and China utilised better technology and medical and sports science resources. Nowadays, she sees the way the Matildas flew business class from Uzbekistan to Melbourne in readiness for the second leg of their final Olympic qualifying tie, while the Uzbek players flew economy. Once there, she saw a sea of goalkeeper jerseys Nike had just put on sale for the first time to satisfy the deafening demand.

Part of the reason that situation has changed so drastically is Williams’s heavy involvement in the players’ union. In 2015, she joined the executive committee of Professional Footballers Australia and, weeks after Australia’s history-making run to the quarter-finals at the World Cup, it was her face in front of the media telling the country that the Matildas would refuse to play their scheduled two-game friendly series against world champions the US. The strike, in protest against the then Football Federation Australia’s lack of financial support and contract security, reaped rewards which have eventually led to equity with their male counterparts, the Socceroos.

“I think once you put in investment and interest in women’s sport – especially women’s football at the moment – there’s going to be a lot of people interested,” she says. “Because everyone has a daughter or a mother, a sister, an aunt, and in one way or another they touch your lives. And I think when they see female athletes going out there and dominating or being inspirational, you just have to back it.”

She also realised just how big of a deal the Matildas had become during the 2023 World Cup, when the team were played highlight reels of fan sites packed to the brim and told stories of a Domino’s delivery man who did not visit a single home that did not have the game on the TV. After Australia’s third-place playoff loss to Sweden, she sat alone, back against one of the goalposts at Suncorp Stadium, reflecting and “bawling” in the knowledge this would be her final time on the field at FIFA’s showpiece event. Mackenzie Arnold, her long-time understudy who rose to first choice in early 2023, came to collect and then comfort her.

Williams has spent the past few years getting herself to a place mentally that allows her to let go of her former role of incumbent and fully embrace the role of mentor to Arnold and other goalkeepers including Teagan Micah and Jada Whyman.

Lydia Williams mentored long-time understudy Mackenzie Arnold (right) during her first World Cup games last year.

“I guess that [comes] from my parents as well,” she says. “If you can help out and make anyone else’s job easier, and that doesn’t take away from your own energy, why wouldn’t you do it? Even now, what can I do to help continue to grow the game, to grow the Matildas, to make sure everyone’s supported. You have to change your identity a little bit with your passion, and my passion’s always been about helping and making sure that people have opportunities. I got my opportunity, so I want to give that back.

“And there’s probably been no better feeling I’ve had than being out there with the girls and seeing their careers grow and the achievements that they’re doing both individually and as a group. And I mean to me they’re still the same as when I saw them on their first cap and their debut and to see how they’ve grown into who they’re now. That’s kind of full circle for me. Just hoping that I had some kind of influence in them and their growth and just being there when it was their first one. And I guess inspiring ’em hopefully in some way.”

Williams, who currently plays for Melbourne Victory, says she will continue for another A-League Women season before hanging up her boots for good and looking beyond football. To continue the guest speaking she has been doing, maybe to safari in Africa, and definitely to continue empowering First Nations people in the way her father did her.

“I’ve gotten my start in life through Indigenous culture, and loving the land and everyone on it,” she says. “The amount of people that I’ve met, especially in Melbourne – there’s a really good Indigenous community there and the family connection – it’s hard to explain. You get this connection to land, culture and country, and then your own specific interests. It’s been really nice to reconnect with that in Australia and in Melbourne in particular. It’s honestly about giving anybody a chance. For anyone who feels like they can’t do it, giving them the opportunity to believe they can.“

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