Sweden come from behind to win 4-2 in Group G match Australia’s captain scores twice but also misses from the spot Sam Kerr would not have forgotten the weight of the silence that stretched and warped the world around her as she stood staring at the ball she had just launched over the crossbar in Nice in 2019. The Matildas had endured an onslaught from a determined Norway side, somehow stumbling into a desperate, exhausted penalty shoot-out in the quarter-final of the Women’s
World Cup.
Kerr – her first major tournament as captain – stepped up to take Australia’s first penalty after Norway star Caroline Graham Hansen calmly buried hers. The camera zoomed in to show a face etched with furious concentration, as though calculating all the possible mathematical variables that have turned modern
Football analysis into a series of algorithms.