How a Keanu Reeves movie explains Alen Stajcic’s latest football fairytale

Alen Stajcic is keen to set the record straight on his legacy with the Matildas. But first, his mind wanders to The Replacements, a sports comedy movie released in 2000 starring Keanu Reeves.

Loosely based on the 1987 NFL strike, Reeves plays a washed-up quarterback who is convinced to come out of retirement to help the Washington Sentinels, whose team is decimated by a players’ strike with four games left in the season. He is one of the eponymous replacements, and they are initially hopeless.

Alen Stajcic sees a bit of Hollywood in the way the Philippines has come to embrace women’s football.Credit: Getty

“There was a band of six guys that were supporting the team,” Stajcic says. “They were losing, losing, losing. Then that band of six became 50, then 100, then 10,000. Then the stadium became packed again as they started winning. And I thought about that movie for whatever reason during the AFF tournament.”

Stajcic is talking about the AFF Women’s Championship of 2022, a regional competition for ASEAN countries. Stajcic was the coach of the Philippines, with whom he had clinched a debut Women’s World Cup appearance a few months earlier.

They hosted it, and they won it - the first-ever trophy in senior football, men’s or women’s, for the world’s 13th-most populous country, whose eyes have begun to open to the wonders of the world’s most-played sport.

Slowly.

Alen Stajcic at training with the Philippines national team in New Zealand this week.Credit: Getty

Their first game was played in front of less than 1500 people. Then 647. Then 429. “Basically empty,” Stajcic says. “Then we’re on top of the table.” The crowd numbers began to climb: 1464, 2923 for their last group fixture, 3233 for their semi-final.

“Then the final was 8500 - it went off,” he says. “And then two days later, the girls are visiting the newly inaugurated president.”

The Philippines’ men’s basketball team - far and away the country’s biggest sporting obsession - was playing in the FIBA Asian Cup at the same time. “Unfortunately for them, they weren’t going well, so there was almost a sliding doors moment for the sport to gain even more traction within the country,” Stajcic says.

“It was a massive moment for Filipino football - for them to know and believe that they can be a force in south-east Asia as a starting point, but hopefully bigger than that.”

Are the Philippines a sleeping giant of football? Stajcic rolls his eyes.

“I’ve heard that before in Australia,” he says. But maybe. “Like Australia, football’s a poor cousin to the major sports. Basketball is number one by a country mile. That also makes our story a little bit more special.”

A new chapter awaits, with the Philippines’ World Cup campaign to begin on Friday in Dunedin against Switzerland. Like any Stajcic team, they should not be written off. Since his acrimonious departure from the Matildas in January 2019, Stajcic has repeatedly demonstrated his magic touch - first, by laying the foundations for the Central Coast Mariners’ emergence as a force in the A-League, recently culminating in a fairytale grand final triumph, and then by linking up with the Philippines, a gig that ensures he will not miss out on the opportunity to coach at a home World Cup, albeit not with the country he thought he’d be guiding four years ago.

Sure, the expansion of the tournament from 24 to 32 teams this edition made it easier to qualify. But that would be to understate the enormity of the task he took on after being approached by former Socceroos goalkeeper Jim Fraser and Western Sydney Wanderers part-owner Jefferson Cheng, the national team’s chief financier, in mid-2021.

Tapping into the huge Filipino diaspora across the world, Stajcic has worked hard to deepen their talent pool, courting a host of US-based players who came through the college system and convincing others like ex-Matilda Angela Beard to switch her allegiance, setting up camps and fixtures around the world to test them. At last year’s Asian Cup, which doubled as their World Cup qualifiers, they reached the semi-finals - a miracle outcome, and a step further than even Australia, who were knocked out in the quarters by South Korea.

“What makes me the happiest is doing something that most people thought couldn’t happen,” he says.

“People in the federation never dreamed we could achieve what we have. It’s not just going to be a flash in the pan of one or two good tournaments, it’s going to be something that lives in the blood of these people forever. Listen to the fans over there - a lot of people were crying the ground because it was the first time they’ve seen real, open belief in Filipino football.

“I’ve learned about their culture, about how much respect there is within their culture. Our team is representative of that culture - the humility, gratitude and respect are the three big ones. It’s just a pleasure to go in and work with this group of players, this team that we have around us, and when you go there, you can just see how that’s infused throughout the whole country.”

Alen Stajcic faces the media after his sacking by Football Australia.Credit: Kate Geraghty

Stajcic’s presence alone will make the Philippines the second team for plenty of his Aussie admirers, particularly those who believe he was hard done by throughout his messy sacking by FFA. If the Matildas falter at the World Cup, they will be lining up to say, ‘I told you so’. You can already sense it.

He harbours no ill feelings towards Australian football. “It’s been in my blood, forever, unfortunately,” he says, tongue-in-cheek.

“I could tell you every national league game I went to from 1980 onwards. I love the game. 2019 was a tough time, no doubt about that. But whether it’s men’s or women’s football, I hope that it reaches the heights that we all think it can and should. We always get disappointed when there’s self-inflicted injuries. We’ve done too much of that to ourselves in Australian football.”

But he bristles at the idea that the Matildas were struggling towards the back end of his five-year reign, and that a coaching change was needed to address it.

“I could rattle off all the achievements,” Stajcic says.

“The Matildas’ record-high ranking, beating America for the only time in history. Winning the first ever knockout match in a FIFA World Cup. Eight wins in a row, a record for the Matildas - those eight [included] USA, Brazil, Japan, Norway. We beat Holland two times just before I left. Holland would go on and win the Euros. Three months later, I heard people say that we can’t compete against European teams. But we were beating Holland in 2018.

“People can take history and twist it however they want. But I know what the history was, and I know where the team was, and I know where it ended up.

“To be honest, I’ll be happy for them to come second in the World Cup and us winning it. Other than that, I don’t think about what they can improve, because it’s not my job. I’ve got enough problems.”