Inspired by the Matildas, spirited young footballer Danielle Warburton takes on the world
Talent and steely resolve have propelled Danielle Warburton from the Outback to the other side of the world: ‘It’s a long way from the Gundy Roos.’
Danielle Warburton just happened to be born at the right time in history for a football-obsessed young girl, and that year was 2006. She’s a child of the Matildas’ Generation, a toddler when Sam Kerr made her debut for Australia, back in the olden days of 2009.
Hers is a very different world from the one in which her idols – Kerr, Katrina Gorry and Hayley Raso – grew up. It’s almost as if she was born on another planet, one previous generations could only have dreamed of.
The Matildas have inspired a generation of young girls such as Danielle, 18, to venture to the other side of the world to pursue their dreams. A few years ago she was living on the edge of the Outback, up on the NSW-Queensland border, pulling on her boots for the Goondiwindi Roos.
This week Danielle signed to play for KVC Westerlo, the Belgian league’s premier women’s team, and, as she says: “It’s a long way from the Gundy Roos.”
Her dad, Steve, is a Bundjalung man from Clarence Valley on the NSW North Coast. He started coaching his daughter in a team of mainly boys from the age of five. She soon became obsessed.
“I’d be out in the back yard for hours and hours and he’d say, ‘I reckon that’s enough, come on, put the ball away’.” she says. “I’d get him to pick me up early from playing at friend’s houses (saying), ‘Dad, I need to train!’.”
Steve runs a rural fencing business where he has teams of men working out on the vast plains surrounding Goondiwindi.
He recalls one summer holiday, when Danielle was about 10 or 11, she came out to help with a fencing job on a farm at Mungindi. It was oppressively hot, north of 40C, when Steve suddenly realised Danielle was nowhere to be seen. He looked around in a panic and asked one of his workers where she was.
The bloke pointed across the enormous paddock to where they’d belted-in hundreds of steel pickets, ready to be threaded with wire.
“It’s 42C and here’s Danielle weaving across the paddock, in and out of the steelies, with the ball at her feet. I said, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ She said, ‘I just need to get a bit of practice in.’ It was 42 degrees!”
Danielle decided she wanted to get serious about her football and that required playing on a bigger stage, and a lot of driving for Steve and her mum, Chantal.
In 2016 she played with a team in Toowoomba, a 450km round trip, and the following year in Brisbane, a 700km nine-hour drive from Goondiwindi and back.
“Mum or Dad would pick me up early from school on Friday and we’d drive 4½ hours from Gundy and I’d train that night with the team,” she says. “In the morning I’d have a personal training session with one of my coaches, and then I’d play that day and then we’d drive home.”
She was trained by some very good coaches, one being Jake Goodship, the former Brisbane Roar W-League head coach.
“From a very early age Danielle just had the most incredible enthusiasm and drive to be the best that she could be,” says Goodship.
She had talent but, more than that, she had something you can’t coach, says Goodship, a steely determination.
And she occasionally got to train with “the big girls” at Brisbane Roar, a team that then boasted Clare Polkinghorne, Katrina Gorry and Hayley Raso. During one legendary session, Danielle managed to squeeze a goal past Mackenzie Arnold. She was 13.
“She was pretty cool about it on the pitch, in front of everyone,” says Steve. “And then, when she got in the car, she screamed, ‘I scored a goal against a Matilda!’.”
Steve had been racking up frequent flyer points and that year he decided to take Danielle and Chantal to the Women’s World Cup in France. Through Dutch connections in Brisbane, Danielle had organised to train with a top Dutch team, when they travelled to the Netherlands after the World Cup.
“We were in France and they called up and said they had a practice game, like tomorrow,” she says.
She pleaded with her parents. She’d saved up lots of money and said she’d pay for the flight. They relented and she flew to the Netherlands and was picked up at the airport by a family friend who drove Danielle to the game for one of the country’s best junior development clubs. Of course, she aced it.
Straight after the game, an official from the club came to her and said they’d like her to play for the club next season.
“I was over the moon,” Danielle says.
She called her parents, back in France. Her father was ecstatic, her mother was in tears.
“She really wasn’t very happy,” says Danielle. “She wouldn’t talk about it for the rest of the holiday.”
Chantal says it was a heart-rending period.
“She was in a great private school in Brisbane, she was doing well … but she’s like, ‘Mum, this is my dream, you’ve got to let me chase my dream’.”
In the end, Mum lost and Danielle got on a plane to the Netherlands, to play for the junior development club, JVOZ in the postcard-pretty southern port city of Vlissingen. She was not yet 14.
Football, in many ways, was the easy part. She moved in with a family friend, who had worked in Goondiwindi, and the idea was that Steve would move to the Netherlands to set up a timber business. And then Covid struck. She was on her own.
She struggled through the first six months, trying to learn a new language, study in that language, and play football.
She’s now fluent in Dutch, is learning German and French at school, and has Dutch friends whose parents have looked after her.
“I’ve made some really good connections … if I go down the street to the shops people will say hello … it’s a bit like the community in Gundy. It feels like home.”
And her football has blossomed.
“I’ve really enjoyed playing football here,” she says. “The club is serious and it’s a serious environment. I like being in a serious environment, it pushes me to get better.”
Moya Dodd, former Matildas vice-captain and former FIFA Council member says the big change for women’s football is due to it becoming professional.
“Imagine if Messi had to work all day, train at night and play on weekends for his whole career. How good would he be?” she asks.
And so soon Danielle will be packing up again, to move to Antwerp to test her skills on the paddock against the big girls.
“My goal is obviously to play for the Matildas,” she says. “When I was really little, we didn’t really watch the Matildas, and then all that changed and now everyone knows Sam Kerr, everyone knows Katrina Gorry, and everyone knows Hayley Raso.”
And everyone wants to be them.
The next Olympics is in 2028 in Los Angeles; Danielle will be 22, and she’d love to be there. It’s a long and arduous road but, if she doesn’t make it, it won’t be for a lack of spirit.
