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Sunday marks the 20th anniversary of a moment that changed the face of Australian sport.
On 16 November 2005, the Socceroos beat Uruguay in a penalty shoot-out to qualify for the World Cup, ending a 32-year drought for Australia on football’s biggest stage.
John Aloisi celebrates the Socceroos’ famous win against Uruguay in 2005.Credit: Vince Caligiuri
There have been many documentaries and books on this subject, so by now you should know them all by heart: Mark Schwarzer’s two savesMark Viduka’s miss, John Aloisi’s match-winning penalty kick and the beautiful follow-up, whose enthusiastic, guttural screams from SBS color commentator Craig Foster say more than any words about what it all means.
But there is an overlooked aspect of that famous night at Stadium Australia. In the years since, our national teams have developed a quiet reputation for thriving when pressure is at its peak, racking up a series of dramatic penalty shoot-out victories in both tournaments and qualifiers.
Of course, the Socceroos lost to Japan on penalties in the 2007 Asian Cup quarter-final. And yes, the Matildas also lost to Norway in the round of 16 of the 2019 World Cup, Brazil in the quarter-finals of the 2016 Olympic Games and China in the 2008 Asian Cup final. As a football nation, we’ve experienced more than our share of heartbreak.
But for the purposes of this exercise, we’re focusing on five landmark shootout wins that pushed those losses aside and reshaped the game in their own way, to ask a slightly more troubling question: what if we lost?
Click here for a whimsical walk down memory lane.
