‘I was just cooked’: The four weeks that shaped Catley’s Matildas captaincy

Steph Catley was in bed at 10.30pm on July 19, 2023. Trying to calm her mind the night before the Matildas’ World Cup opener against Ireland. Already feeling the magnitude of the next day, many hours before a record crowd of 75,784 was due to file into Sydney’s Stadium Australia.

Then came a knock on her hotel room door. “I looked in the peephole and it was Sam,” she recalls. “And immediately I just knew.” Sam Kerr had injured her calf, and a final scan result confirmed the captain would probably play no part in the group stage of her team’s most important tournament to date.

“She basically walked in and said, ‘This is your team now’,” says Catley, who had been Kerr’s vice captain but in those five words was immediately elevated to skipper and designated penalty taker. “Immediately I just had a lot of emotions for her. I was really, really sad.

“Then we just talked for a long time. We had lots of different conversations. About how the team looked without her, and then about more general things like penalties. Sam’s just always been such a great leader in our team, and such a great person in my life.

“Within the Matildas, we lean on each other a lot, for lots of different things. And while this moment was not a nice one, it definitely helped me out in a situation that was unexpected and brought a lot of pressure in a short amount of time.

“The World Cup was probably the most high-pressure situation that any of us have ever felt as footballers. So I suppose you are already feeling the pressure, you’re already anticipating so much. And then for the night before the first game, for all of that to happen and then fall on my shoulders in a way, it was pretty intense.”

Steph Catley celebrates after scoring from the spot against Ireland, 24 hours after Sam Kerr knocked on her hotel room door.Credit: Edwina Pickles

The following evening, Catley wore the armband and scored the decisive penalty in Australia’s 1-0 win over Ireland, and led the team out for every match thereafter until Kerr returned to the starting line-up in the semi-final loss to England (including another converted penalty to ice the 4-0 group-stage defeat of Canada).

It was by no means her first rodeo. The 30-year-old has been a central figure in the national team since she was a teenager, and had previously stood in as skipper on multiple occasions. But her role throughout that history-making World Cup emphasised a couple of key things about Catley as she prepares to captain the Matildas for the entirety of the Olympic Games – regardless of whether that mystery “lower leg injury” keeps her sidelined for the opening group game against Germany this Friday morning (3am AEST).

The first is that her presence, both on the field and off it, is just as vital as that of Kerr. The second is that said presence seems to be – externally, at least – somewhat taken for granted. She has always been there, as a player of 126 caps, three World Cups and soon-to-be three Olympics is. And she has always performed to a near-faultless standard, as one of the world’s best left-backs would.

These are now such foregone conclusions that they rarely generate headlines. If one were to compare Catley to a muscle, she is the perfect counteragent to Sam Kerr’s calf. One created uncertainty; the other instilled confidence.

Catley (centre) with her Olympics vice captains Emily van Egmond (left) and Ellie Carpenter.Credit: Getty Images

“I’ve always looked at leadership as a role that I’ve never wanted to seek,” she says on the eve of the Matildas’ Olympics campaign. “But if I’m [being] myself, and that’s what people view as leadership, then I’m doing my job. And if I change anything about what I’m doing, that’s not natural leadership. So I very much am a person that leads by example.”

Behind the scenes, that can look like a “give and take with young players” who may find the squad’s direct style of communication intimidating, and tailoring her feedback accordingly. The public-facing version comes across as a mature thinker and an eloquent speaker. Catley laughs when it is suggested to her that she often seems to be the player wheeled out to face the media straight after a bad result, almost as if she is the safest pair of hands to deal with negative questions from journalists.

“I’ve actually had a laugh with [Matildas media manager] Ann [Odong] about it before,” she says. “I think there was one after we went out of the Asian Cup early, and a couple before that. And I just thought ‘there’s a trend happening here’. I feel like in all the bad moments, the public are just seeing my mug and probably thinking ‘it’s all your fault’.

“But no, I would say I’m pretty good at separating the emotion from a message that I need to get out. That’s probably one of my strengths: no matter what I’m feeling, I can separate it from the logical next step of ‘how do we move on from here and what’s the best way to go about it?’ Some are harder than others to articulate well, especially when I’ve been involved in the emotions of the game and I’m feeling a whole lot of things myself.

“It can be tough, and sometimes you say what you think and feel to a camera and then step away and think, ‘Geez, have I given too much or maybe not enough?’ It is a really fine balance. But if our media manager keeps shoving me in front of the camera in those moments, then hopefully that means I must be offering the right message.”

Perhaps the only time that compartmentalisation mechanism has been breached occurred after the World Cup play-off loss to Sweden that denied the Matildas a bronze medal and signalled the end of a tournament they had been building towards for four years. Media waiting to speak with players post-match in the bowels of Suncorp Stadium were told Catley would not be asked to come out from the dressing rooms because she was too upset.

“That’s really interesting to hear,” says Catley, whose experience at that moment was so borderline out-of-body that the memories are slightly blurred. “I don’t think I could really even talk to the person in front of me. I was so drained, and I think the second that whistle went, and my body knew that the whole process was done, the exhaustion that just fell over me was something I’ve never felt in my entire life.

“I was physically exhausted. I was mentally shattered. Just the pressure of the whole situation. The way Australia got around us was incredible, but the whole few weeks had been so intense, and even when you left the hotel there was never a switch-off. So I think the weight of it all just came crashing down.”

Fans push to the fence to greet Catley after the Matildas sealed Olympic qualification in February.Credit: Getty Images

The hangover did not subside for weeks, until she had returned to London and started Arsenal’s Champions League qualifying rounds.

“A lot of athletes, in particular Olympians, have spoken about the post-tournament lows you go through, and it definitely is a thing,” Catley continues. “The next day, physically more than anything, I was just cooked. And when I went home to my family, I remember just not wanting to leave the house. I just couldn’t gather myself enough to go out and do something and be social.”

Catley’s biggest learning heading into the Olympics – with Kerr absent once more, this time with a ruptured ACL – was the need for an “immediate layer” of leadership underneath her. During the World Cup, in a bid to keep the pressure off Kerr as the striker completed her rehab, she shouldered a lot of the load internally and “could have leaned on people more than I did”. For these Games that has been rectified, with Ellie Carpenter and Emily van Egmond appointed vice captains, and she is already feeling the benefits.

Whether it is her or one of those two leading the team in game one remains to be seen, with coach Tony Gustavsson giving nothing away about the nature or severity of Catley’s mystery injury, which ruled her out of the warm-up loss to Canada. But Catley herself says, “At this stage I’ll be good for the first game.

“I’m doing really well, just ticking a few boxes,” she says. “Obviously it’s annoying timing because I’ve been feeling fit and ready to go, and then something small just pops up. It’s a little bump in the road, but it definitely hasn’t taken me out of any part of the tournament at this stage. I’m looking forward to the first game and just getting ready for that.”

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