World Cup: Logarzo loses prickly side and trusts process

Chloe Logarzo says that being left out of Australia’s World Cup squad in 2015 was the best thing that ever happened to her.

Player of the match Chloe Logarzo, top, celebrates with teammates after Australia defeated Brazil in Montpellier. Picture: AAP

If Chloe Logarzo was a plant, she’d be a cactus. And her name would probably be Salvatore, just like the tattoo on the inside of her arm.

Part of the Matildas star’s undying love for this widely underrated member of the Cactaceae family comes from her pedigree as a landscaper. The rest is drawn from her own challenges in football and in life.

“I just think they’re very beautiful and very misunderstood, I guess,” Logarzo tells The Weekend Australian. “I think it’s a lot like me. I went through a hard time. It doesn’t really take much water to make them survive so it’s a little bit like me.”

There’s truth in that.

The fact Logarzo has just been named player of the match against Brazil at her first Women’s World Cup is quite something, because there was a time not so long ago she was getting by on very little sustenance indeed.

Coming out as gay at 17 was a challenge in itself, and one that indirectly caused family friction when she moved out of home with her first partner and detached herself from most of what she knew.

“I think I just pushed away my parents because they really wanted me to focus on soccer, and at the time I was just back and forth about what I wanted to do,” she said. “My father played football and my mum was a long-distance runner, and I think I hurt them a lot with some of the stuff I said about them wanting to live their dreams through me. They let me be me and they were just there to pick up the pieces when I fell apart and needed to come home. It took two years but the amount of love I have for them … I appreciate them so much more.”

The pitch threw up trials too and Logarzo, now 24 and a regular starter of 40 caps, is adamant getting cut from Alen Stajcic’s 2015 World Cup was the best thing that ever happened to her.

Then only 20, the Sydney FC midfielder ditched football entirely and picked up a job landscaping, rising at 5am, six days a week, in search of the meaning she felt was missing.

“I wanted to live a normal life,” she said. “I went backpacking, travelled to five or six different countries. I did a lot of stupid things in that time … it was definitely what I needed.”

Logarzo partied hard until the resentment towards what she thought football had stolen from her youth ebbed.

It was sitting at a bar in Greece watching the Matildas at the World Cup in Canada — the World Cup she wanted to be at — that it really hit home.

“Watching the girls I was almost crying,” she said. “It was quite sad but it was definitely an experience for me. I’ll never let my head get big enough to the point where it takes over my football again.”

So the 165cm tall ball of energy took herself back to Australia and into a tattoo parlour in Sydney’s Newtown where Salvatore came to life. The name, which means ­“saviour”, came courtesy of the artist, a fellow Italian.

It’s her “forever cactus”, an ­addition to the real-life cactuses at her home in Washington, in the US, where she plays in the NWSL for Spirit.

“I’ve got a few and all my cactuses have names,” she says. “They all start with C. Right now in my house I have two, Catalina and Caswell.”

There’s another tattoo on ­Logarzo’s arm that reminds her to “Trust the process”.

“I actually believe in that,” she said. “I did everything I possibly could. If it doesn’t pay off in one or two years, it may pay off in five or 10. It paid off in 10.”

A decade ago a young Logarzo couldn’t even crack the state team and became used to getting told she simply wasn’t good enough.

Funny how things turn out, given she’s now in France having just scored a goal and set up ­another in the tournament’s biggest comeback for 24 years.

“It affected me a lot, having faith in myself,” she said.

“Staj was a big person who believed in me. He was and is still a massive influence on my career, but over the years I’ve finally been able to have faith in my ability.

“When I was younger I worked as hard as I could to prove my coaches wrong. Then I got to the point where I proved my coaches wrong so I represented my country for my family.

“Now I’m playing in my first World Cup and it’s purely just for me. All the shit that I went through, everything that ever happened, this is just for me.”

The Daily Telegraph