- Joey Lynch, Australia Correspondent
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Joey Lynch is a Melbourne-based sports journalist, AYA Cancer advocate, cynical centre-half and Zack Ryder mark. Primarily working on football, he has covered the Socceroos, Matildas, A-League, W-League, Y-League, the Australian grassroots and beyond.
Jul 19, 2023, 08:55 PM ET
The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup officially commences on Thursday with New Zealand hosting Norway at Eden Park in Auckland before Australia take on Republic of Ireland at Stadium Australia. Only, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody Down Under who would say it’s Australia playing in the second game; instead, they’d say the Matildas will be taking the field in front of more than 80,000 fans in Sydney – the team’s name having become one of the most well-ingrained and beloved titles in all of Australian sport.
Australia’s women have come a long way since players had to fundraise individually to pay for kits, training equipment, and even the airfares needed to represent their country. Eager to bask in the halo effect of the team’s rise and the incoming World Cup, brands have been jumping at the chance to attach their branding to the Matildas in recent years, and earlier this year the team was revealed as Australia’s fourth-most popular team – and rising.
Given the power that “Brand Matilda” now carries, it’s remarkable to think that the team spent much of its early existence without a nickname of any kind, with names such as Lady Socceroos, Soccerettes, Soccerbelles and, tear-inducingly, even the “Sexy Socceroos” attached to it by various parties.
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After a successful qualification for the 1995 Women’s World Cup, however, a push for a more definitive and unique identity took on greater impetus. A phone poll was organised by national multicultural broadcaster SBS and the Australian Women’s Soccer Association, which at the time ran women’s football separately from the Australian Soccer Federation, asking the public to vote on five options in an exercise in nomenclature: The Soccertoos, Blue Flyers, Waratahs, Matildas, and Lorikeets – with Matildas coming up trumps.
The name had been used informally for a while, with an excellent investigation by the Sydney Morning Herald determining that four-time Matilda Sharon Young likely deserves credit for coining the nickname during what would ultimately prove to be an unsuccessful attempt to qualify for the first FIFA Women’s World Cup in 1991; the nickname was inspired not by the folk song Waltzing Matilda but, instead, the gigantic animatronic kangaroo that had been the star of the opening ceremony for the 1982 Commonwealth Games in Brisbane.
Of course, Australian sport loves a nickname, and football is no different.
Australia’s men’s football team are the Socceroos, a title born in 1972 as part of efforts to raise their profile ahead of the 1974 FIFA World Cup; Sydney journalist Tony Horstead helped to embed it into the public’s consciousness. The men’s under-23 side that competes in the Olympics, meanwhile, is imaginatively known as the Olyroos. Junior national sides simply add the Young or Junior prefix to the name of their senior counterparts except for the boys’ under-17 team, which is called the Joeys -- one of the best nicknames in all of sports.
The unofficial Australian team that competes in the World Medical Football Championship have a bit of fun with it, calling themselves the ‘Docceroos’.
Australia’s habit of bestowing its teams with nicknames stretches back to 1908, eight years after the nation’s birth, when a rugby union side touring the Northern Hemisphere, having already seen a New Zealand side bestowed with the title the All Blacks, a South African side the Springboks, christened themselves the Wallabies. Rabbits was the first suggestion until it was pointed out that naming the team after an invasive pest species so troublesome that a 3,253 km fence was built to keep them out might not be the best idea.
A few months later, a rugby league side arrived in the U.K. with a live kangaroo as a mascot, making the second nickname given to an Australian national side an easy one to figure out.
While those two teams may have been the first, they certainly weren’t the last; Australia’s women’s rugby sides, for one, have picked up the label of Wallaroos and Jillaroos.
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For the most part, these names have been drawn from the unique flora and fauna that populates the country but, in some cases, the names reference cultural references or the plentiful precious stones that can be found Down Under.
In netball, for instance, Australia is represented by the Diamonds. In basketball, the men are the Boomers – which refers to kangaroos not the generation – while the women’s team is the Opals. Field hockey has the Kookaburras and Hockeyroos, while in the pool the national swimming team is the Dolphins and the water polo teams are the Sharks and Stingers.
Such is the proliferation of nicknames within Australian sport that it’s notable that the men’s cricket team doesn’t possess one. Cricket Australia undertook consultation on creating a nickname for the team in the 1990s, partly inspired by the success of nicknames for state sides such as the South Australia Redbacks and Victoria Bushrangers, only for the significant majority of those canvassed to reject any such attempt.
In recent times, often driven by marketing companies attempting to rank brand strength, we have seen attempts to label the team the Baggy Greens, after the players’ famous caps, but they have been met with confusion as to who they were referring to, and almost no appetite to try and make the name stick.
