Alex Chidiac played a grand total of seven official minutes of the 2023 World Cup, not including stoppage time. Australia head coach Tony Gustavsson sent her in for the last five minutes of their group-stage game against Nigeria, a 3-2 loss, and then for the last two minutes of their semifinal against England, when Alessia Russo had just put the Lionesses up 3-1 over the home favorite Aussies.
After their elimination from the World Cup, Chidiac was one of the few Matildas who was able to talk at length in the mixed zone without crying, answering questions with a rueful grin on her face. It had been her lot during the tournament to support the team as a substitute, one not often called upon by Gustavsson despite describing her as a player who could help change the tempo of a game.
A few weeks after that semifinal elimination, Chidiac reflected on the moment in a bare bedroom in Monterrey, as yet mostly undecorated due to her hasty move from Racing Louisville to Tigres save for a Drogba jersey on a hanger hung from the curtain rod, some stuffies on the bed, and a row of Lego figurines on her desk, including a little raccoon given to her by former Racing teammate Rebecca Holloway.
“I was sitting there with my best friend Aivi Luik after the (semifinal),” Chidiac said via Zoom, “And yeah, she was letting out emotion. I was trying to cheer her up a little bit. I think where I go to is a little bit more like, you know, joke around and then I’ll cry by myself.”
Chidiac and Luik after Australia’s World Cup elimination. (Photo: Alex Pantling – FIFA/FIFA via Getty Images)
It’s taken these intervening weeks between leaving Australia and her official debut for her new club to let herself sit with everything that happened and, perhaps, have that private cry away from the constant hustle of camp and flights and mixed zones and expectations.
The initial processing was a little bit deferred; first the team had to turn around and fly to Brisbane to play Sweden for third place. Then Chidiac had to return to the United States, and then almost immediately pick up and get herself down to Monterrey. So she stayed busy.
“I found out the Monday after the World Cup final and left Friday, and they wanted me to leave Thursday. So I didn’t have a lot of time. It seems like, okay, I’m actually moving to Mexico and then I was in Mexico,” Chidiac said.
While the move was a whirlwind, the decision to leave wasn’t necessarily a spur of the moment one. Chidiac hadn’t gotten a lot of playing time at Racing Louisville — just 133 minutes in eight games this season — and she knew she wanted a change. Now she’s on a three-month loan.
“So I get to see how things are here. What it’s like, what the league’s like, maybe play a little bit more my style,” she said. “Also for me, I’ve always wanted to go back to more, like, Spanish type of football.”
It also helps that Chidiac is, in her words, “pretty decent” at Spanish. She’s kept up some faithful Duolingo streaks for the past few years, including one that lasted nearly 500 days until she got onto a long flight and didn’t check the app. Speaking Spanish is still hard, but she understands a lot, and the immersion is helping her get more comfortable by the day.
“Everyone has been super welcoming. And you get that sense they really want you to feel comfortable straightaway, so that’s been really helpful,” said Chidiac, who got her home debut at el Volcán on September 11 as a substitute against León.
“The girls were really helpful, as well, with communicating where I needed to be or what I needed to do,” she said. “It just felt comfortable. And I looked up there was always a player to pass to. You know, like there was encouragement to kind of like I wasn’t being told to change completely what I do… I felt like I’ve been able to kind of have a bit of a freedom to express myself a little bit more. Be encouraged to shoot more like have, you know, that kind of mentality again, which is nice.”
“I think it does help massively that I know some Spanish because that way I can communicate with the coaches,” she said. “And I’ve kind of been used as a translator between some of the other internationals — myself and the Spanish girls at times — which has been a different experience for me. I’ve never been, I guess, a ‘translator.’ I’ve always been the one saying ‘What’s going on?’”
The Tigres opportunity was also fortuitous in that Chidiac didn’t want to go home and play in the A-League just yet, even though she’s found some of her biggest club successes with the Melbourne Victory. She knew that if she arranged a transfer to an A-League team, she’d have an even harder time leaving after the World Cup, even if the tournament itself didn’t really leave anyone much room to think in general.
“If I do come home, I want to come home for multiple years,” she said. “It’s difficult, obviously moving countries and having to go through this process over and over again. It takes a toll on you and it takes a toll on you know those around you, as well.”
So she picked up her life again, this time for a city where, despite the warm welcome and good football, it’s been a little bit rough switching over to a different time zone and climate and elevation in just a couple of weeks, not to mention being a vegetarian in a city renowned for its cabrito — roasted baby goat. Chidiac said she was getting two hours of sleep a night in her first week thanks to the upheaval, and that’s when the post-tournament processing finally took hold.
“When you don’t sleep, you definitely have time to think about everything and process it,” she said. “I’m not gonna lie, it was kind of tough because you’re just emotional from everything and you’re kind of letting all your emotions out. I felt like I kind of was a bit more like, robotic throughout the World Cup because you just have to keep going. It was one thing after the other, you’re constantly catching flights to different cities, you kind of have all this expectation from your home nation too and (we) were clearly doing very well. So there’s a lot of things going on, and you have to just get through it. So when I finally stopped, I was like, I need to let some emotion out. It’s been strange.”
Chidiac wasn’t just processing the loss to England; it was the whole thing. The crowds, the coverage, the unprecedented groundswell of love throughout the country for the Matildas.
Chidiac laughed as I told her a story about trying to cancel my Australian healthcare coverage, which I’d been required to get as a condition of working in the country during the tournament. The nice woman in the cancellation department wanted to know why I didn’t need the coverage anymore; I said I was only there for the World Cup. Her response was immediate: Did you get to see the Matildas? Weren’t they amazing?
“To be part of something that’s special and that is going to leave an imprint on the game forever, that’s definitely something I’m super grateful for and really privileged. I got to experience it, literally right there within it,” Chidiac said.
It wasn’t all about getting eliminated, or losing out on third place and a chance to end the tournament on a high. There were grace notes for Chidiac as well, like getting to see her family after her World Cup debut against Nigeria. The team had been told they weren’t allowed to see family after the game and to go straight into the tunnel to leave the field. But the team’s security let Chidiac see her family after she finished her post-game running, including her partner and her childhood best friend, whom she hadn’t seen in years.
But there’s also the reality of that seven minutes of playing time. Of course Chidiac wanted more minutes; she was hardly alone in that. But, she pointed out, she was having to manage those feelings in a team where other players were being asked to step up and grind to help compensate for an injured Sam Kerr, leaving them physically and emotionally exhausted, while other players were playing but wanted more, and of course Kerr herself had to sit out some games entirely. And in the midst of all that, they were being asked to find unity.
First of all, seven minutes or 70, a World Cup is a World Cup. Australia might have been losing but that didn’t take away from the magnitude of the occasion when Chidiac came on in the semifinal.
“Definitely playing in that game against England was a blur. I think it was five minutes or so,” she said. “And yeah, first time I stepped on the field at that stadium with the 75,000 people in the stands, I could not tell you that I was surrounded by people. I had no idea what was going on. I was just like, okay, I’m on in a semifinal and if we don’t win we don’t make the final and we’re not back here again.”
But it was that same position as a substitute, someone who had come on when the odds were practically nil to make a comeback in time, that perhaps let Chidiac function with dry eyes in the immediate aftermath.
“I think it might be different if I was playing every game and feeling so close to it, if that makes sense,” she said. “But I think because I was also like, a little bit on the outside looking in — not that far on the outside, obviously I was right there — but you can have a little bit more perspective and think wow, what we did was incredible. And the imprint that we’re leaving on the nation. So I think I was able to maybe see that a little bit earlier than others. I’m not sure. I mean, obviously you’d have to ask others how they feel about it, but I mean, my feeling leaving that tournament was, take aside us losing, I think what we did for football in Australia is incredible.”
(Top photo: PATRICK HAMILTON/AFP via Getty Images)
