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    Australian Open: Ben Shelton, the American With the Blinding Serve, Returns

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    He made a splash at last year’s event, reaching the quarterfinals, and went on to have a breakout season.It all started with a simple text message that, if Bryan Shelton’s memory serves him, went something like this:“That coulda got really interesting,” wrote his then-20-year-old son, Ben, moments after he won a fifth-set tiebreaker against Zhizhen Zhang at last year’s Australian Open, clinching that first-round match.Had it not been for that win, in a match that began in the morning and ended at night under the lights, during which Shelton survived a heat postponement, a rain delay and a match point, he might never have had the breakout season that he had last year.“Not sure I remember it that way, because it did get kind of interesting,” said Shelton by phone shortly after he and his father traveled to Brisbane, Australia, from their Florida home in late December to begin the 2024 season with a pre-Australian Open warm-up tournament. Shelton did, however, recall the unreturnable serve he hit at 4-5, 30-40 down in the fifth set.Shelton left last year’s Australian Open, his first trip abroad, as a quarterfinalist after succumbing to his friend and fellow American Tommy Paul. By season’s end, Shelton had reached the semifinals at the United States Open alongside the world’s top three players — Novak Djokovic, Carlos Alcaraz and Daniil Medvedev — and cracked the ATP’s top 15. The young American had begun 2023, his first full year on tour, ranked barely inside the top 100.Shelton is still very much a work in progress. Despite a serve that topped out at 149 m.p.h. at last year’s U.S. Open, he struggled trying to adapt to clay and grass courts. It is something that he and his father, who left as head coach at the University of Florida last spring to coach his son full time, have worked on diligently during the off-season.“The biggest thing for him is movement,” said Bryan Shelton, a tour player mostly in the 1990s. “It’s efficiency, being more balanced. The men’s game today is all about the serve and return and creating opportunities to come forward, which Ben can do.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Sharks on an Australian Golf Course Made a Watery Grave Like no Other

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      A group of bull sharks ended up spending 17 years in a lake by a golf course’s 14th hole, suggesting that the predators can live in low-saltwater environments indefinitely.For nearly two decades, the Carbrook Golf Club near Brisbane, Australia, had the ultimate water hazard: a lake teeming with bull sharks.It all started in 1996 when raging floods swept six young bull sharks from a nearby river into a 51-acre lake near the golf course’s 14th hole. When the floodwaters receded, the sharks found themselves stuck, surrounded by grassy hills and curious golfers.The sharks spent 17 years in the lake, sustaining themselves on its large stock of fish and on the occasional meat treat provided by the club’s staff. One shark was illegally fished out, while the others vanished after subsequent floods.The sharks, according to a new study, are more than just a fluke along the fairway. In research published last month in the journal Marine and Fisheries Science, Peter Gausmann, a shark scientist and lecturer at Ruhr University Bochum in Germany, said that the cartilaginous club members of Carbrook demonstrate that bull sharks can live indefinitely in low-salinity aquatic environments.Bull sharks can be found in warm coastal waters the world over. These stout sharks can reach 11 to 13 feet in length and weigh upward of 500 pounds. They are one of the few shark species that can tolerate a wide range of salinities, a trait that allows them to venture into freshwater and brackish habitats such as rivers, estuaries and lagoons.Unfortunately, this impressive adaptation often puts the sharks in close quarters with humans, one of the many reasons bull sharks are responsible for dozens of documented fatal attacks on humans.In 1996, flooding swept six young bull sharks from a nearby river into a 51-acre lake near the golf course’s 14th hole. When the floodwaters receded, the sharks were stuck and have been there ever since.Scott WagstaffIf most sharks were to enter a freshwater environment, their internal salt levels would become diluted and they would die. But bull sharks have specially adapted kidneys and rectal glands that work together to recycle and retain the salt in their bodies.Freshwater and brackish habitats provide young bull sharks a place to grow up without the threat of predation from larger sharks. Once they’ve reached maturity, however, bull sharks usually head to the sea, where larger prey and breeding opportunities abound. That the Carbrook shark population did not grow during their time in the golf course offered further evidence that the species prefers to breed in saltier environments.While scientists have long known that bull sharks have the means to move between fresh and saltwater environments, no one knows if these sharks could spend their entire lives in freshwater.Research suggests bull sharks can live about 30 years, and the Carbrook group survived in the golf course’s lake for 17 years. That suggests there is “no upper limit” to how long these sharks can spend in low-salinity environments, said Vincent Raoult, a postdoctoral researcher at Deakin University in Australia who was not involved in the new study.“I think a lot of people would be scared to learn there could be bull sharks in their local pond, but the fact is, it’s pretty amazing that there are animals that are able to do this,” Dr. Raoult said.While the idea of sharing a lake with bull sharks may be scary to some, the golfers relished the opportunity, Scott Wagstaff, general manager of Carbrook Golf Club, said.“Every single member here just loves the sharks,” Mr. Wagstaff said.Extreme floods like the ones that washed sharks in and out of Carbrook Golf Club are becoming more common, and more bull sharks could end up marooned in lakes, lagoons and ponds.Carbrook Golf ClubWhen the sharks were still around, he and other staff would toss chunks of meat into the water and marvel at the way the sharks devoured the food with their fearsome maws. “I’ve seen them jump completely out of the water and spin as they land. It was pretty cool,” Mr. Wagstaff said.Extreme floods like the ones that washed sharks in and out of Carbrook Golf Club are becoming more common, and more bull sharks could end up marooned in lakes, lagoons and ponds. Although you are highly unlikely to encounter a bull shark in your local swimming hole, Dr. Gausmann recommends avoiding bodies of water recently affected by flooding.“You should never bathe in stagnant bodies of water that once had a connection to the sea. You never know if sharks are living there,” he said, although people in urban areas may not need to worry, as urban floodwaters are often too toxic to sustain marine life.And there is another lesson to take away, as shark sightings and occasional attacks on human swimmers prompt fearful reactions in some places.“If this paper has shown anything, it is that it is possible to live side by side with sharks,” Leonardo Guida, a shark scientist with the Australian Marine Conservation Society, said. More

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      Australia Loved the Matildas. Will It Continue to Love Women’s Sports?

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      Australian fans are mourning their team’s semifinal defeat at the Women’s World Cup. Beyond the ache, there are concerns about whether the support for women’s sports will last.The morning after Australia’s dream run at the Women’s World Cup ended one win short of the final, Denisse Lopez, 34, found a quiet spot to sit in Darling Harbour. She was still wearing the Sam Kerr jersey she had put on for Australia’s semifinal loss to England the night before. She carried a book and a croissant, a type of pastry she had denied herself, because of its origins, until her team had beaten France in the quarterfinals.Betrayed by her puffy eyes, Lopez admitted she had been crying. She had attended all of Australia’s matches in this World Cup, starting with their first group stage contest four weeks earlier, using airline miles to follow the Matildas up and down the country’s east coast. So strong was her belief in the team that she had secured tickets to the final but not the third-place match in Brisbane, where Australia will play Sweden on Saturday.“It just came out this morning,” Lopez, who lives in Melbourne, said of her tears. “The players started posting about the loss, and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m sad.’ Mostly, I feel flat and disappointed for the girls. But, you know, there’s one more game.”Hosting the tournament along with New Zealand, Australia was a cauldron of complex emotions after the hometown team fell shy of the outcome that many Australians did not know they wanted so badly until it came so close to happening. Disappointment was mixed with pride, but there was also some uncertainty about whether there would be the fan and institutional support needed to sustain Matildas fever beyond this quadrennial tournament being held on their home soil.This is a sports-mad country, but not necessarily a soccer-mad one. The Daily Telegraph, a local tabloid, cited a survey taken before the World Cup that said most Australians could not recognize any Matildas players besides Kerr, the team captain and star striker. Surely that is no longer the case, as breakout players like goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold and forward Mary Fowler have become instantly recognizable through countless on-field close-ups. Thursday morning in Darling Harbour, fans approached Cortnee Vine, the substitute who scored the winning penalty kick in the quarterfinal, for a selfie as she appeared to be out for a walk with family members.Matildas fans cheered before Australia’s match against France in the quarterfinals.Dan Peled/ReutersBut Kerr’s plea, in the aftermath of a defeat that left her in tears, that her sport receive the kind of funding that is devoted to the Australian Football League or the National Rugby League was a reminder that there is no guarantee that this moment has permanence. Australia Coach Tony Gustavsson had referred to this as a “crossroads moment” for the country’s investment in women’s soccer to match that of some of its top opponents, such as England. Perhaps similarly recognizing the fragility of the bond between Australians and their Matildas, midfielder Katrina Gorry urged supporters not to jump off the bandwagon. And just 14 hours after more than 75,000 fans packed Stadium Australia in Sydney for the semifinal against England, the Matildas asked fans on social media not to forget that they still had one more match. Rana Hussain, a Melbourne-based inclusion and belonging specialist in sports, said the tension around what happens next contributed to her heartbreak as she lingered in the stadium after the final whistle on Wednesday night, not wanting the magic to be over. “It’s the fear that we go back to the old normal, especially after having a taste of what life feels like when we do fund and invest in women’s sport and what it does look like when the crowds turn up and to see that it’s possible,” she said in a phone interview. “We all kind of are holding our breath waiting to see, do we go back to business as usual? Or is this really the line in the sand that we’re all saying it is and hoping it is?”Hussain wrote on social networks that Australia would never look back after this run, which she admitted was as much to reassure herself as anything. She also encouraged fans to continue supporting Matildas players as they disperse to their club teams, sometimes in other countries, a common obstacle to sustained support after major international tournaments. The morning papers on Thursday predicted staying power. The lead headline of The Australian declared, “Dream Kerr-tailed but national love affair’s just begun.” The front page of The Telegraph asserted that despite the loss, “our girls in green and gold have changed the nation’s sporting landscape forever.”The semifinal broadcast reached 11.15 million Australians, more than 40 percent of the population, according to ratings figures released by OzTAM, Australia’s audience measurement source. The national average audience of more than seven million, which does not include viewers at pubs or other venues, made the game the most-watched television program since the measurement system began in 2001.Because women’s sports were born of exclusion, said Kasey Symons, a research fellow with the Sport Innovation Research Group at Swinburne University in Melbourne, they often generate a more welcoming and inclusive fan culture. She saw that happen during this World Cup, and said the passion of new fans contributed to the emotional hangover that she too was working through on Thursday morning.“I think a lot of people are trying to navigate some feelings they don’t really know too well,” Symons said in a phone interview. “There’s just this really overwhelming sense of validation that women in sport has value, and people have connected with that. So that’s a really emotional experience to see that and feel part of it, and that sense of belonging I think is a really important part of this.” The broadcast of Australia’s match against England on Wednesday drew more than 11 million viewers in Australia, not counting those who watched in bars or public gatherings like at Federation Square in Melbourne.Joel Carrett/Australian Associated Press, via Associated PressIn Darling Harbour, the FIFA fan festival was closed on Thursday, but Clare Roden, 46, a teacher who lives a two-hour drive down the coast, was asking a security guard for information about getting in on Saturday to watch the Matildas. She bought a ticket to the final last October, not thinking her team would be in it — but over the last week she started to believe it would happen. She still plans to go to the final between England and Spain, painful as it may be, but first needed to lock down her viewing plans for the third-place match.Lopez was hoping to make the trip up to Brisbane. After all, she had been at every other Matildas match this tournament.She is a newer fan who began watching soccer during the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, when pandemic-related restrictions in Melbourne kept her home. Australia’s win over Britain in the Olympic quarterfinals got her hooked, and as an immigrant from the Philippines, she felt connected to a game that is international. She began attending the Matildas’ friendly matches, some with crowds a fraction of what she saw during this tournament, and bought the FIFA 23 video game because Kerr was on the cover.Even after the agonizing defeat, Lopez found solace in rewatching the moment that had given the home crowd a final surge of hope: Kerr crossing the midfield line with the ball, gaining steam as she drove forward and then delivering a strike from over 25 yards out. Lopez posted a clip of that goal to Instagram with a caption to which most of Australia could relate: “Mentally we’re still here.” More

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      Kerr Scored. The Crowd Roared. But England Wasn’t Done.

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      England advanced to its first World Cup final by leaning on the experience and the resilience of a champion.The entire continent of Australia had been waiting not so patiently for the moment that finally arrived in the 63rd minute of Wednesday night’s Women’s World Cup semifinal between Australia and England.Collecting the ball in her own half and crossing the midfield line, Sam Kerr was off. Head down, driving forward, she took a couple of quick dribbles, then a few more, then nudged the ball ahead of her right foot and fired. Her shot, struck hard and high from just outside the penalty area, soared past the reach of England goalkeeper Mary Earps.Kerr had wheeled away in celebration by then, even before the ball had settled into the net, and the home crowd inside Stadium Australia let out a deafening and sustained roar. Australia had pulled even with England, and for the first time in the match, it seemed as if the English might be on the ropes.THAT’S ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT 🤩GOLAZOOO SAM KERR 🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/Gnts261nW2— FOX Soccer (@FOXSoccer) August 16, 2023
      Maybe a previous version of the team would have been. But this England team scored eight minutes later to pull back ahead, and then added a third goal in the 86th minute. It had, in less than half an hour, turned a tenuous moment into its most dominant finish of this tournament, a 3-1 victory over Australia that sent the Lionesses to their first World Cup final, where they will face Spain on Sunday.“We’ve got that in this team,” England defender Lucy Bronze said. “We’ve got resilience. We’ve got an inner belief that, I think, is bigger and better than we have ever had previously.”Bronze was part of the England squads that lost in the World Cup semifinals in 2015 and 2019, disappointments that she has admitted have lingered with her. Getting over that hump in this tournament was hardly a linear path, even after England won the European Championship last year on home soil.England arrived at the World Cup last month without three of its top players, all sidelined with knee injuries, and it has played its past two games without its initial breakout star here, midfielder Lauren James, who served a two-game suspension for stamping on a Nigerian player in the round of 16.Coach Sarina Wiegman also pointed out that her players have faced added attention since winning the Euros, which can bring new challenges and absolutely brings heightened expectations. On Wednesday, though, England looked all the better for that experience — a seasoned team that thrived, rather than crumbled, under pressure.Australia’s Mackenzie Arnold was beaten three times on Wednesday.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/Reuters“I don’t think anything fazes us,” said midfielder Ella Toone, who scored England’s first goal, before halftime. “We’ve faced a lot of challenges this tournament that we’ve just got on with and got through.”Indeed, a theme of this tournament has been England’s finding a way to win, even as it has taken a while to find the dominant form many had expected. In their early matches, the Lionesses relied on strong defense and Earps’s steady goalkeeping as they struggled to score. Against Australia, though, it was their goals that silenced an expectant home crowd.Having the stadium backing the other team was nothing new, of course. Bronze referred back to England’s 2-1 quarterfinal win against Colombia, when the Lionesses fell into an early deficit in front of another crowd that also heavily favored their opponent. The visceral release inside the stadium after Kerr’s goal was at a different level. While those kinds of moments are expected from Kerr — even if she was not entirely healthy coming off her calf injury — defender Jess Carter said England’s back line was still disappointed to have allowed her goal, frustrated because they felt as if they should have handled it better.The next few minutes felt a little bit shaky, Wiegman admitted, as the replays of the goal on the stadium video screens wound up the fans again and the noise continued to reverberate. Kerr got another chance on a header, and then another. Earps appeared to signal to her teammates to settle down. The only way through, England knew, was to stick to the game plan, and hold its nerve.“I thought we did really well, but we have done that really well the whole tournament so far,” Wiegman said. “And then, of course, it didn’t take that long before we scored a second goal. And that helps.”Alessia Russo sensed her clinching goal was in even before it crossed the line.Mark Baker/Associated PressThat may be the quiet strength of these England players: They have won in different ways this tournament, changing their tactics to suit their opponents, adapting on the fly when those tactics aren’t working, holding teams off until someone, somehow, conjures a goal. But it was the way they responded to Kerr’s equalizer that demonstrated above all else why they will be playing in the World Cup final.Forward Lauren Hemp scored in the 71st minute, off a long and searching pass by Millie Bright, England’s captain. Fifteen minutes after that, Alessia Russo delivered the final blow: a low right-footed shot after a driving run up the center by Hemp.Just as Kerr had done, Russo wheeled away to start her celebration even before the ball had settled into the net. She knew, England knew, the job was done, and the final beckoned. On the bench, Wiegman finally let herself relax.“We are not,” she thought, “going to give this away anymore.” More

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      The Matildas and the World Cup Crack Australia’s Code Wars

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      The World Cup has added a new dimension to a national sporting conversation often dominated by the rivalry between rugby and Australian rules football.Inside the vast sweep of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, almost nobody was paying attention to what was happening on the field. Those fans who remained in their seats were staring up at the big screens, absorbed by a game a thousand miles away. Many had given up the pretense entirely: They were on the concourse, gathered around any television they could find.The match they had come to watch at the M.C.G. was a significant one. Only a couple of games remained in the regular season of the Australian Football League, and the two teams in attendance, Carlton and Melbourne, were jockeying for position in the playoffs. The stakes were high enough to draw a crowd of almost 70,000 fans.For much of the first quarter, though, the spectators’ eyes and minds were elsewhere: In Brisbane, to be exact, where Australia’s World Cup quarterfinal with France had gone to a penalty kick shootout. The live sporting event playing out in front of them could not compete with the appeal of the Matildas. At this point, very little can.Over the course of the last three weeks, Australia has fallen — and fallen hard — for its women’s soccer team. The whole country seems to be decked out in green and gold. Images of Matildas players beam out from billboards and television screens and the front pages of every newspaper.One paper, The Courier-Mail of Brisbane, was briefly rebranded as The Kerr-ier Mail, in honor of Sam Kerr, Australia’s captain. Anthony Albanese, the prime minister, has expressed support for a national holiday if the team wins the World Cup.“We went out on a team walk in Brisbane before the France game,” defender Clare Hunt said. “And I had a moment where I thought: ‘Oh my God, this is actually happening.’ We were swarmed by the public, and they were chanting for us. We are a little separate from it, but when you’re in packed stadiums, when you see people on the streets, see people investing in women’s soccer, you realize what’s happening.”The Matildas’ games have consistently shattered records for television viewing figures. Their crucial group stage victory against Canada attracted an audience of 4.7 million people, making it the most-watched program of the year on the national Seven Network.The Australia team applauded fans after its quarterfinal win against France on Saturday.Dan Peled/ReutersTheir next game, against Denmark in the round of 16, was watched by a total of about 6.5 million people. It was the biggest television event of the year, on any network, for roughly four days: until the peak audience for Australia-France in the quarterfinals stretched beyond seven million.That figure does not include those who streamed it online or the vast crowds that gathered in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Perth to watch it en masse. By most estimates, it was the nation’s highest-rated sports event in a decade. The team’s semifinal match with England on Wednesday was cumulatively expected to surpass the 8.8 million who watched Cathy Freeman win gold in the 400 meters at the Sydney Olympics in 2000.The best gauge of how deep the Matildas’ impact runs, though, is in the reaction from Australia’s other major sports. For years, soccer, men’s or women’s, has struggled to compete for both attention and revenue in what is an unusually rich sporting ecosystem, fading in comparison not only to cricket, the national summer game, but to a panoply of winter sports, all of which are known, a little unhelpfully, as “footy.”“For a long time, the country was divided along the Barassi Line,” said Hunter Fujak, a lecturer in sports management at Deakin University. The line, named in tribute to the famed former player, coach and commentator Ron Barassi, is an imaginary, but potent, fissure. It runs from northwest to southeast, splitting Australia’s population, if not its geography, roughly in half.To the west of the line (Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, Darwin, Tasmania) lies Australian rules football country. East of it (Sydney, Brisbane, Canberra) is rugby territory. The latter comes in two forms: rugby union, comprising teams of 15 players and broadly considered middle class; and rugby league, the more popular and more blue collar version played with teams of 13.Traditionally, relations between those various sports — the so-called football codes — are frosty. They have tended to hover, in fact, somewhere between resolutely competitive and downright hostile, a phenomenon known in Australia as the code wars. The battle is a prominent enough feature of the country’s cultural landscape for Fujak to have used it as the title of a book on the subject.“All of the codes have historically been resistant to each other’s success,” Fujak said. In part, the motivation is just business: Australia may be an immense country, but its population is relatively small.Members of the Freemantle Dockers watching the Women’s World Cup match between Australia and France on the stadium screens before their game in Perth.Paul Kane/Getty ImagesThe A.F.L. and the N.R.L. — the national rugby league tournament — are competing for the same limited number of eyeballs, broadcast deals, commercial revenue and governmental subsidy. The working assumption has always been that one’s rise must come at the expense of the other. “There are only so many people to go around,” Fujak said. “You would expect that of Coke and Pepsi, so why would the sports leagues be any different?”The enmity is so keenly felt, though, because it runs significantly deeper than mere mercantile instinct. “There’s a very strong rivalry at the cultural level,” Fujak said. “At a fan level, the sport you follow is inseparable from identity. For Victorians, being an A.F.L. fan is part of who you are, where you’re from.”In that power struggle, soccer has long been little more than collateral damage. If the A.F.L. and N.R.L. have cast themselves as not just authentically Australian but as a central pillar of a localized identity, soccer has been projected as an often unwelcome import.Though it has always been popular as a participatory sport, the game — as one notorious, offensive mantra put it — was long cast as a lesser form, simultaneously effeminate, foreign and homosexual. Craig Foster, a former Australia player and now a human-rights activist, recently told the BBC that the A.F.L., in particular, has been “antagonistic” toward soccer.That animosity has manifested in both the practical — refusing soccer teams access to its facilities, declining to allow its stadiums to be used as part of Australia’s doomed bid to host the 2022 men’s World Cup — and the petty.It was noted, for example, that the A.F.L. chose to release its schedule for this season at almost the exact minute Australia’s men’s team kicked off against Argentina in the men’s World Cup last year. The A.F.L. has always maintained it was just a quirk of timing.In the weeks leading up to the Women’s World Cup, it appeared little had changed. Though several rugby league stadiums were slated to host matches, the A.F.L. had not been willing to surrender its largest arenas, the M.C.G. and the Sydney Cricket Ground, two of Australia’s best-known venues.That posture, Fujak said, was not unreasonable: FIFA’s rules would have required the A.F.L. to vacate its two major arenas for two months at the very height of the season. “The demands were too onerous,” he said. Still, it did not exactly suggest that Australia’s other sports were about to show the Women’s World Cup, or the Matildas, much hospitality.Australia during the quarterfinals.Asanka Brendon Ratnayake/ReutersOver the last few weeks, that concern has been proved demonstrably false. “This is without doubt one of the most exciting times to be an Australian sports fan in the country’s history,” said Andrew Abdo, the N.R.L.’s chief executive. “The Matildas’ performances in the World Cup have made a monumental contribution to the rise of women’s sport in Australia.”In deeds, as much as in words, the A.F.L. has been no less effusive. It has moved kickoff times to accommodate Matildas games. On Saturday, it broadcast the France quarterfinal before, during and after games in Melbourne and Sydney.Matthew Nicks, the head coach of the Adelaide Crows, admitted he would rather “be watching the Matildas” than guiding his team in a game against the Brisbane Lions. He and his counterpart, Chris Fagan, were filmed watching the penalty shootout on a phone when they were supposed to be conducting their postgame media duties.Both codes of football, the commentator George Megalogenis wrote in The Brisbane Times, have been “dreading the moment that soccer holds the nation’s attention, and now that moment is here.” So compelling has the Matildas’ journey been, though, that they have melted away every last vestige of resistance.Foster, the former men’s player, believes that has been rooted more in pragmatism than a fundamental, lasting shift in the way the codes regard each other. The A.F.L. agreed to show the France game in its stadiums because “it was worried nobody would turn up” for the fixtures otherwise, he said.Fujak, too, suggested that willfully ignoring the tournament would have made the A.F.L. look “sulky and negative” at a moment of uplifting national unity. “It’s the most strategically astute sports league in the country,” he said. “It might be cynical, but I think they saw it as the lesser of two evils.”He wondered if the A.F.L. had made something of a calculation. “They’ve always played the long game,” he said. “Soccer has moments of success but, come the end of the tournament, it fades away again.”The risk, this time, is that the effect will be more lasting, that this tournament has on some level reshaped Australia’s entrenched sporting landscape. The code wars may rumble on, in some form, but the Matildas, at least, have risen above them. They have become, in three short weeks, a core part of the country’s identity. More

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      Australia Beats France on Penalties to Reach World Cup Semifinals

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      Australia needed 10 rounds of penalty kicks to confirm its place in the team’s first semifinal, and extend its country’s wild ride.By the time it was over, the overriding feeling at the Brisbane Stadium was not so much euphoria or ecstasy or relief but dizziness. Not from the heights that Australia has reached in its home World Cup, beating France to reach a first semifinal, but from the winding, coiling, nauseating road it took to get there.The game itself was fraught enough, the goal-less stalemate of the score line belying more than two hours in which the balance of power hopped back and forth: France started well, composed and inventive, only for Australia to wrestle control. It was not an evening defined by patterns of play so much as storm surges, and the ability to withstand them.The 120 minutes of play before the penalty kicks were defined by each team fighting for control and withstanding pressure.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThe penalty shootout that decided it, though, was something else entirely. France missed its first kick, with Australia goalkeeper Mackenzie Arnold denying Selma Bacha. Solène Durand, the substitute goalkeeper brought on by France as a penalty specialist — or, who knows, perhaps just a piece of psychological warfare — saved a shot from Steph Catley.Ève Périsset, introduced specifically to take a penalty, missed France’s fifth; Arnold, the goalkeeper, stepped up to win it. She stepped up confidently. Durand did not move. The crowd started to celebrate. Her teammates accelerated toward her. Her attempt struck the right post. Australia would have to wait.Each team had taken eight penalties by the time Arnold saved another, this time from Kenza Dali. The goalkeeper had, though, stepped forward too soon. It had to be taken again. Dali chose the same side of the goal, a double bluff. Arnold called it. She saved it again. Clare Hunt stepped up to win it for Australia. By that stage, it was hardly even a surprise that she could not convert.Instead, it would be Cortnee Vine who decided it. Vicki Bècho was the last French outfield player set to take a penalty; after her, Durand would have had to take her turn. But Bècho struck the post, and with a nation watching, Vine kept her composure, and Australia had survived, 7-6, in the shootout. The thunderclap that followed was tinged with just a hint of desperation, the energy ever-so-slightly frantic.Mackenzie Arnold saves a penalty from Kenza Dali.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesCortnee Vine, a substitute, scoring the winning goal for Australia.Justin Setterfield/Getty ImagesFrance’s captain, Wendie Renard, consoling Vicki Bècho, who hit the post.Franck Fife/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAustralia has, over these last three weeks, embraced this team in a way that has been simultaneously predictable — this is an enormous sporting nation, one that draws a considerable proportion of its identity from its prowess in the various sports it takes to heart — and wholly surprising to those who have witnessed soccer’s struggles for acceptance.It is not just that the stadiums have been full: The World Cup is an event, a showpiece, a good day out, and almost every country on the planet is united in enjoying the sensation of being part of a major event. It is that the streets are full of green-and-gold, that the newspapers have images of the Matildas front and center, that it is the primary topic of discussion.The fact Australia’s progress has continued will only exacerbate that, of course, now that the country is only two games from a world championship. It is the nature of it, though, that is perhaps the best advertisement for soccer’s curious charms.For three hours, nobody in the Brisbane Stadium could tear their eyes away, nobody could take anything for granted. As they walked away, they would have felt not only delighted and proud but nauseous and drained, too, their nerves frayed and torn by what they had been through. And that, after all, is the point of sport. It is what will draw them back in four days, when a semifinal, and the chance to live it all again, hovers on the horizon. More

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      World Cup Picks Up Baton for Women’s Sports in Australia

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      For as long as there have been sports in Australia, women have clamored to play and participate. But winning visibility, and support, has been a long road.Fans celebrated in central Melbourne this week after a national triumph: The Matildas, the Australian women’s soccer team, had defeated Canada, the reigning Olympic champion, 4-0.It was a glorious victory after a dismal start to the Women’s World Cup for one of the two host teams. In Federation Square, Australians held up gold and green scarves and bellowed, “Up the Matildas!”Two years earlier, the same city had seen a similar outpouring of support for the Australian women’s cricket team. Inside Melbourne Cricket Ground, more than 86,000 people had gathered to watch the final of the Women’s T20 World Cup, while 1.2 million people tuned in from elsewhere in Australia.For Ellyse Perry, an Australian sporting legend who has represented the country in both the cricket and soccer World Cups, the 2020 match — the largest crowd ever to watch a women’s cricket match — was a milestone for women’s sports in Australia.“It’s really now starting to become embedded in general society, and it’s commonplace,” she said. “We don’t think differently about it. It’s not an oddity any more.”For as long as there have been sports in Australia, women have clamored to play and participate. What is believed to be the world’s first cycling race for women took place in Sydney in 1888; the country’s first golf championship, in 1894, was women only; and at the 1912 Olympics, Australian women won silver and gold in the first women’s Olympic freestyle race.Yet even though Australian women’s sports have an extensive and proud history, only recently have they received significant mainstream support. A strong run in the World Cup — Australia will face Denmark in the round of 16 on Monday — was seen as an opportunity to change that, to cement the place of women’s sports in the country’s daily rhythms and conversation.Australia’s win over Canada saved it from an early elimination, and sent it to a game against Denmark on Monday.Cameron Spencer/Getty ImagesSam Kerr, the Matildas star who is widely regarded as one of the best players in the world, said the impact of the tournament on women’s soccer was all but unimaginable.“For years to come, this will be talked about — hopefully, decades to come,” she told reporters last month, citing an uptick in young boys and girls coming to women’s soccer games.A longer view on the history of women’s sports in Australia involves many moments of triumph, but also times when able and enthusiastic sportswomen were simply shut out.“There are peaks and troughs all the way through,” Marion Stell, a historian at the University of Queensland, said of women’s sports in Australia. “Women make advances — but then it goes away again. It’s never a smooth upward curve.”Only in the past couple of decades had female athletes been able to make consistent strides on pay, opportunities and representation, she added. Today, half of all Australian girls play sports at least once a week, according to the Australian Sports Commission, compared with about 30 percent of girls in the United States.“I don’t think anyone would have dreamed that it would happen so quickly,” Dr. Stell said. “On one hand, it’s been very slow. But on the other hand, when it happened, the floodgates just opened.”Yet despite their enthusiasm, and their prodigious talent for bringing home Olympic medals, female athletes in Australia have, like their international peers, historically been sidelined, blocked or simply not taken seriously.In 1980, women’s sports made up about 2 percent of print sports coverage in Australia. By 2009, women’s sports made up about 9 percent of television news coverage, according to a report from the Australian Sports Commission. But the balance appears to be shifting: A poll last year found that nearly 70 percent of Australians had watched more women’s sports since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.Fans watching the Australia-Ireland match in Melbourne on the World Cup’s opening night.Hannah Mckay/Reuters“A lot of it has been in line with the way that social perception has changed more broadly, in terms of how we perceive women’s role in society, and particularly the workplace,” said Perry, the sports star.Dr. Stell, the historian, pointed further back. She saw the 1976 Montreal Olympics, where Australia failed to win a single gold medal, as a turning point. The country’s lackluster performance spurred a significant backlash in the Australian news media, which described the results as a “crisis for the government” and called for action for Australia to “regain its lost athletic potency.”Women had historically been something of a golden goose for Australia at the Olympics, making up a minority of the country’s total athletes but often winning the majority of its medals. At the 1972 Games in Munich, for instance, 10 out of 17 Australian medals were won by women, even as they made up only about 17 percent of the team.And so in 1981, Australia established the Australian Institute of Sport, a high-performance sports training center for both men and women that, for the first time, gave women the financial support to concentrate on their sports full-time — beginning with Australian rules football, basketball, gymnastics, netball, swimming, tennis, track and field and weight lifting.That was followed a few years later by the Sex Discrimination Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of gender or sexuality.“Those two things together might be some kind of watershed,” Dr. Stell said. “But not, I guess, in the public imagination — more in sporting women’s lives.”The Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra, established in 1981.David James Bartho/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesThe facility offered dedicated training space to women in a variety of sports.Andrew Rankin/Fairfax Media, via Getty ImagesEven after that, female athletes in most other sports often had no alternative but to play in a semiprofessional capacity. In the mid-1990s, as male Australian cricket players were on the cusp of striking over what they felt was inadequate remuneration, female players in the sport barely had their expenses covered, and often had to pay their own way to compete. Most juggled jobs and other commitments alongside their sports careers.“How did it make me feel? I just wanted to play as much cricket as I possibly could,” said Belinda Clark, who was the captain of Australia’s World Cup-winning women’s cricket teams in 1997 and 2005.She added: “We all structured our lives — our working lives and our personal lives — around being able to do that. That comes at a financial cost. We all accepted that.”In recent decades, cricket has led the charge on fair pay for female athletes in Australia. While male cricketers still significantly out-earn their female counterparts, the majority of female players earn at least 100,000 Australian dollars, or $66,000. By comparison, female players of Australian rules football, rugby league, netball and professional soccer have a minimum salary of less than half of that — a source of ongoing tension since it is far below the country’s living wage.Across all sports, perhaps the most important factor for female athletes was having women in positions of responsibility across journalism, management, coaching, umpiring and administration, Dr. Stell said.In the early 1980s, Australian universities began to offer the country’s first sports management degrees. “That kind of allowed women to get a kind of professional qualification so that they could take the administration of sports off the kitchen table and make it more professional,” she said.Belinda Clark next to statue of herself, with Quentin Bryce, the former governor general of Australia, at left.Brett Hemmings/Cricket Australia via Getty ImagesWomen are gradually becoming more visible as sports people in Australia. But it was not until earlier this year that a female cricket player was celebrated in statue form for the first time, though the country claims more than 70 statues of male players.A bronze statue of Clark was unveiled at Sydney Cricket Ground in January; it is the first public statue of any female cricket player anywhere in the world. Representation of that kind sends a powerful message, especially to younger players, Clark said.“What are the photos in the club? Who’s on the honor boards? What are we saying to the people that walk in this door?” she asked. “Are you part of this, or are you a guest or a visitor?“It symbolizes that you’re actually part of it. You’re no longer coming, cap in hand, to beg for an opportunity.” More

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      Australian TV Deal Has World Cup Viewers Asking: Where Are the Games?

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      When FIFA sold Australia’s World Cup broadcast rights to a streaming service, it made it harder for casual fans to find the matches.The Women’s World Cup is by most estimates the biggest sporting event to be staged in Australia since the Sydney Olympics. FIFA, the tournament’s organizer, has trumpeted record ticket sales, and it has hailed the event both as a celebration of the popularity of women’s soccer and as a way to carry it to new fans and new markets.But while viewers in Australia could watch all 64 games of the recent men’s World Cup played in Qatar on a free-to-air network, FIFA struck a deal for the broadcast rights to the Women’s World Cup — as it did when the tournament was played in France four years ago — with the cellphone operator Optus, which has placed the bulk of the matches on its pay television network.For viewers in Australia, that has meant the majority of games can only be watched via subscription, making it harder for viewers living in one of the tournament’s host countries to watch the tournament than it has been for fans in places like Europe and the United States.“It’s very disappointing to not have the coverage the women deserve,” said Beth Monkley, who was in Brisbane with her daughter this week to follow Australia’s team. “It’s a fantastic sport for everyone, so inclusive. And for some reason Australia has decided not to show all the games free to air.”Legislation in Australia means the entire event cannot be placed behind a paywall, since games involving the men’s and national women’s soccer teams are considered of such significant importance that they are on a list of protected events that must be broadcast for free nationwide. The World Cup final also has a place on that protected list.This year, 15 tournament games will be available on Channel Seven, a free-to-air network authorized by FIFA and Optus to sub-license some rights. (Optus separately said it would offer to stream 10 games for free to users who sign up for its platform.)But the uncertainty about which games will be on the air, and when, has led to significant frustration among soccer fans, but also casual fans in sports-mad Australia, where soccer lags behind the country’s most popular sports, rugby, cricket and Australian rules football.On Thursday morning, Andrew Moore and his wife joined the throng of visitors to a FIFA fan park set up on the banks of the Brisbane River to watch the most eagerly awaited game of the group stage, a clash between the United States and the Netherlands. The Moores stood out.While most of the crowd were outfitted in the yellow and green of the Australian team that would play later in the day against Nigeria, the Moores were wearing matching maroon and golden jerseys of their favorite rugby team, the Brisbane Broncos, which was scheduled to play at the same time as the Matildas’ kickoff against Nigeria.While Australia’s matches are easy to find on television, the same is not true of all teams.Dan Peled/ReutersMoore said all the pretournament advertising and promotion had led him believe that all the games would be broadcast on Channel Seven, a network familiar to Australian sports fans. So a day after he watched Australia and New Zealand play their openers on free television, he settled in to watch the next round of games.But when he grabbed his remote control and flicked to Channel Seven, and then to its subsidiary channels, he could not find a game. “I thought there was something wrong with the television,” he said.Moore said for casual soccer viewers like his family, which already has several pay television subscriptions, signing up to Optus to watch the Women’s World Cup did not make sense, particularly since the sports he favors are on other networks. In Australia’s fragmented television market, most domestic sports rights are split across a number of pay and free-to-air networks. Fans seeking telecasts of major soccer leagues and tournaments from outside the country often must turn to more networks and more subscriptions.That has left FIFA trying to defend disparate priorities: its desire to attract new fans to women’s soccer, and a new commercial approach that seeks to maximize revenue for a tournament that it hopes will eventually grow closer to the popularity of the men’s event, which is the most-watched tournament in global sports.FIFA declined to comment on the rationale for its broadcast agreements in Australia beyond issuing a statement saying that both Optus and Channel Seven “have committed significant resources to covering and promoting the tournament” and claiming that their “combined efforts have led to record viewership figures for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in the region.”That record, experts said, was always likely to be met, given Australian and New Zealand’s host nation status and a favorable time zone for the games. David Rowe, a professor at the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University, described the lack of the type of blanket coverage that the men’s tournament typically enjoys as a “missed opportunity.”Optus, reacting to the outcry from viewers, has pointed out that broadcasters’ rights fees “are key to ensuring the continued growth and equality of women’s sport, and contribute to everything from grass roots momentum to salaries for our national players.”Soccer’s place within Australia’s sporting landscape has always been a precarious one, said Rowe, an expert on sports and media in Australia. He said the sport was for decades viewed with suspicion by a population grappling with a wave of migration after World War II.“Football got a reputation as foreign at time when there was a lot of suspicion toward people who were not British in the early days of multiculturalism,” he said.He credited the relative success of Australia’s women’s team in establishing itself as one of the best in the world as helping boost the sport’s appeal at home, much as victories and championships by the United States women’s team had popularized the sport in America.That popularity has been visible in the tournament, with record attendances and packed stadiums for Australia’s first two games.FIFA’s sale of the broadcast rights in Australia comes as it tries to promote the women’s game more broadly. Darrian Traynor/Getty ImagesStill, for FIFA, the Women’s World Cup is not close to being the cash cow that the men’s event has become. The estimated $300 million it will earn from selling broadcast rights to the women’s tournament is only about a tenth of what the organization brought in for the rights to the Qatar World Cup in 2022. FIFA and its president, Gianni Infantino, have accused broadcasters in Europe of undervaluing the tournament, and at one point even threatened to not sell rights in key territories — essentially imposing a blackout — if the offers were not increased. As the tournament neared, FIFA eventually backed down on that threat.With FIFA’s coffers swelling with reserves of $4 billion and forecasts of more to come with the next men’s World Cup estimated to generate $11 billion, there was little urgency to sell domestic Women’s World Cup rights to the highest bidder, Rowe said.“It’s chump change for FIFA,” he said. “I do think it’s a lost opportunity.”In Brisbane, as Matildas fever gripped the Queensland capital ahead of the Nigeria game, the sense of a missed opportunity appeared to be near universal.By the time Monkley got to Brisbane with her daughter this week to follow the Australian women’s team, she had been forced to fashion an unusual routine to watch other games in the tournament, by connecting a cable between her phone and her hotel television to stream the games.In Melbourne, where Australia now faces a must-win game against Canada, Alyssa Birley and her husband, Cameron, had traveled across the state so their children could watch the match. The family even booked the same hotel as the Australian team so that their children could get even closer to their heroes. But they said that they have not shelled out for an Optus subscription.The result, Alyssa Birley said, was that her children could not follow other top nations.“It’s inspirational, especially for young girls, to see these top tier athletes and it should be accessible to them,” Cameron Birley said. “Where else can they get that?” More

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      Sam Kerr Is Australia’s New Queen

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      Sam Kerr’s tone barely shifted. She had not, she said, had time to think about it yet. She had put it to the back of her mind. She had other things on which to focus her attention.Her response muted to the point of deadpan, Kerr gave the distinct impression that the offer, to some the offer of a lifetime, was just another bullet point on a busy schedule, another item on her to-do list: Barcelona on the road. Liverpool in the league. Westminster Abbey, to act as Australia’s flag-bearer at the coronation of King Charles III. Everton away.Of course, she said, she was conscious that being handpicked by Australia’s prime minister to carry her country’s flag at the coronation was an “amazing, amazing honor.” It would, she acknowledged, probably be the sort of thing she would “tell my kids about in 10 or 15 years.”It was just that the idea of it did not faze her. Indeed, such was her insouciance that she admitted that her first instinct when offered the role was to turn it down. She thought she was too busy to attend a coronation. She assumed she would have a training session that day. She did not want to miss training simply to carry a flag.Sam Kerr, left, and Australia during parctice.William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThose that know her, though, would offer a supplementary explanation. Kerr has long been regarded as possibly the finest player in women’s soccer. She was, for a time, the highest-paid female player on the planet.Her teammates, colleagues and friends are unanimous in asserting that nothing that status has brought — the profile, the money, the attendant pressure — has left the slightest mark on her. “She comes across as real chill,” her Australia teammate Mary Fowler said. “For any of the pressure that I may feel, it’s multiplied for her. So I’m just like: Props to her for being able to deal with that and come across as if it doesn’t affect her.”That, she said, is just who Kerr is. It is also exactly who Australia needs her to be this month as she prepares to carry her country on her shoulders once again at the Women’s World Cup. (The start of her World Cup, though, will have to wait: On Thursday, Kerr was ruled out for at least the first two games with a calf injury.)At 29, Kerr has been a superstar for some time. Four years ago, when Chelsea was preparing its bid to sign her, the club’s management had to present a case for the investment. Both the fee to acquire her services and her salary were, at the time, substantial commitments by the standards of women’s soccer.Their case was that the money was dwarfed by her marketability. Kerr was, by that stage, the face of the sportswear manufacturer Nike in Australia. The possibility of her signing was a driving force in the decision by Optus Sport, the Australian broadcaster, to acquire the rights to the Women’s Super League in England. Chelsea’s board was told not to consider the idea that Kerr was expensive, but to see her signing as a bargain.“If there is an icon of this World Cup, it’s her,” one media executive said of Kerr, adding, “In terms of universal respect, I can’t think of anyone who is on a par with her.”William West/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesThis summer has borne that out. Kerr is the undisputed star, the main event, the central character of not only the biggest Women’s World Cup in history, but a World Cup that Australia desperately hopes to win on home soil.Her image has been plastered across the country. She is front and center in all of the tournament’s marketing campaigns. She has been depicted, alongside Princess Leia and John Lennon, in a mural in the hip Sydney suburb of Marrickville, and she is on the cover of an updated edition of the FIFA video game. She has published an autobiography. She is, as her former teammate Kate Gill put it, the “poster person for the team.”Seemingly every major news outlet has carried an account of her upbringing in Fremantle, just outside Perth, in Western Australia, detailing her family’s rich sporting background — both her father and brother played Australian Rules Football professionally — and her rise to prominence in a sport that she and her family initially “hated.”“She is everywhere here,” said Jon Marquard, the television and media executive who pieced together that Optus deal. “If there is an icon of this World Cup, it’s her. The position she is in is actually a pretty unusual thing. In terms of universal respect, I can’t think of anyone who is on a par with her.”Her sporting peers in Australia, instead, skew toward the historical, those whose legacies have been burnished just a little by time: the runner Cathy Freeman, the swimmer Ian Thorpe, the tennis player Ashleigh Barty. Her current peers, even in the traditional national sports cricket, both codes of rugby and the A.F.L., do not compare.Kerr, carrying her nation’s flag, leading an Australian delegation into Westminster Abbey during the coronation ceremony for King Charles III in London in May. King Cheung/Associated PressIn a nation as consumed by sports as Australia — “sport to many Australians is life, and the rest a shadow,” as the essayist and thinker Donald Horne put it in 1964 — that is a considerable honor. Marquard puts that broad popularity down not only to Kerr’s achievements, particularly outside Australia, but to her nature.“We have historically had a bit of tall poppy syndrome,” he said, referring to a situation where a person’s success causes them to be resented or criticized. “There is a cultural ethos in Australia generally of not getting above yourself. Anyone who does tends not to be seen as authentic, and that is central to the culture.“You can respect what someone like Nick Kyrgios has done, but he can be quite divisive. Whereas Sam has none of that hubris. She’s seen as genuine. The whole team is, really: You see them spending ages chatting with fans after games. Even with all of the demands on her, Sam has stayed quite grounded. It’s quite remarkable.”Steph Catley, a defender for Australia, put it rather more succinctly in comments to The Sydney Morning Herald. “She’s out there,” she said. “She’s very just like: ‘Blah. I’m Sam. This is me.’ She’s still like that.”That means, rather than being intimidated by her status — and the expectation now heaped on her shoulders — Kerr seems not only to welcome it, but to encourage it. She has spoken, semi-regularly, of her hopes for this tournament and what it will provide her — and provide women’s soccer in Australia — with what she terms a “Cathy Freeman moment,” a reference to the runner’s iconic victory in the 400 meters at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.Kerr with fans after an exhibition victory against France last week in Melbourne.Mackenzie Sweetnam/Getty ImagesGuiding Australia to a World Cup win in the same stadium, Kerr has suggested, would have much the same impact on a subsequent generation of Australians.“If the pressure’s not there, it probably means it’s not that big of a game to be honest,” she said this month. “Pressure is a privilege, and I love pressure. I love being in a moment where one or two moments can change the path of your career, really, and I think this World Cup is one of those moments.”By the time Kerr allowed herself to think about her exact role at Westminster Abbey in May, she admitted that she did get just a little nervous. All she had to do was walk a few paces in front of the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, but she had to do it with the Australian flag on her shoulder and the eyes of the world upon her.That was the first coronation she attended this year. Her hope is that there will be another, and one in which she will have a significantly more prominent role. The difference is that this time she is not nervous at all. More