MELBOURNE, Australia — The walk into the stadium here at late afternoon Monday brought a whoa. It looked as if last December in the Middle East had flowed directly into this July Down Under, as if the lifeblood of the men’s World Cup back then in Qatar had relocated about 7,500 miles to stir some energy at this women’s World Cup just now in Oceania. Where Moroccan fans in thundering droves had formed the soundtrack of that first Arab World Cup, Moroccan fans in a large cluster on the corner beside Melbourne Rectangular Stadium fed the soundtrack of this first women’s World Cup with an Arab team — which is, of course, Morocco.
End of carouselSo this chillier air, too, filled with drums, songs, cheers, red and green.
“It’s happening, and it’s never happened before,” said Hasnaa, a Moroccan woman from Casablanca and an eight-year Melbourne resident, who declined to share her last name. “And we are so happy to support the Moroccan team and for them to be the only Arab team in the World Cup.” For young Moroccan girls, she said: “It’s really important and it’s like they’re the idols for them. The young girls are watching this Moroccan team in the World Cup, and they want to be like them.”
After the national anthems, of course, a grudging type of ladder usually awaits such debuts. There’s a reality. That reality would come in the ensuing hours, when Morocco’s first women’s World Cup match looked very much like the budding against the established, with the established, Germany, ranked No. 2 in the world behind only the United States, posting the kind of score, 6-0, that sometimes marks such arrangements.
By the end of the first-ever Group H match in a women’s World Cup, before a spirited 27,256 in a 28,870-seat stadium, with German flags waving and Moroccan roars greeting any advancement by the Atlas Lionesses, the public address announcement of nine minutes of added time could have brought a sigh of sympathy for the players in red and green, who looked weary even with the five substitutions summoned by Manager Reynald Pedros.
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The Germans, after all, have a purpose and a mission and a bit of a chip. They would like to return to the concept of winning this thing, as their teams did in 2003 and 2007, after going out in 2011 as a host in the quarterfinals (to Japan), in 2015 in the semifinals (to the United States) and in 2019 in a stunner in the quarterfinals (to Sweden). They would like to build on their advancement to the 2022 Euro final, which they lost to England after a pre-match muscle injury to longtime star Alexandra Popp that caused her absence.
Die Nationalelf, as the German team is called, looked primed and precise, and Popp looked very much like Popp.
With appearance No. 129 for Germany at 32, and with goals Nos. 63 and 64 for her country, she thrived even as she stated a title as her only intent. She scored in the 11th and the 39th minutes for a 2-0 lead that seemed lock-solid even among 2-0 leads.
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She scored when 20-year-old Wolfsburg teammate Jule Brand grabbed a stray Morocco pass and fed Kathrin Hendrich up the right side, whereupon Hendrich took a turn with it before crossing gorgeously to Popp’s head in the center, whereupon Popp directed it in easily, and she scored when she wriggled between defenders to set her shoulder upon a corner. Each time, her teammates surrounded her in a manner that looked more formulaic than frantic, as if they understood their superiority in seasoning.
Morocco tried commendably. It made occasional threats. It got a breakaway in the 41st minute for Fatima Tagnaout that caused German goalkeeper Merle Frohms to come out and thwart Tagnaouti before the referee’s flag scrubbed it anyway. And it got the ball into the back of the net in the 54th minute to rev up the crowd before the referee’s flag gave the offside frown again.
As a team that reached the final of the Africa Cup of Nations and played that before 50,000 in Rabat, Morocco has nine players who play at home, six who play in France, two each in Spain and Belgium and one each in Italy, England, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. It has the pride the country feels after its men’s team reached that semifinal last December while decking European snobs Spain and Portugal, and it has the idea that soccer just got even bigger in Morocco, but it has a ranking of No. 77 and doesn’t have (yet) the familiarity with playing a team like Germany as the countries met for the first time.
So the gates of its defense withered and then withered utterly. Right out of the tunnel at halftime, Germany scored to make it 3-0, when another stray Morocco pass found its way to Germany’s Klara Bühl, who charged up the left with it before belting it across the goal to Brand, who nudged it to Lina Magull, whose quick shot hit the right post. Somehow a certain justice turned up, though, because after Morocco couldn’t clear it, it rolled to Bühl, who came in from the left and skimmed it back along the grass into the goal.
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Own goals that clearly stemmed from the German pressure got it to 5-0, and substitute Lea Schüller’s rebound after a hectic save by Morocco goalkeeper Khadija Er-Rmichi got it to 6-0. That made it the second match in this tournament with a difference of five goals or more, perhaps a byproduct of an event expanded from 24 teams to 32. The previous World Cup, in France in 2019, had only two such finals — Italy’s 5-0 win over Jamaica and the United States’s notorious 13-0 win over Thailand.
Now Germany seemed to score again in the harsh added time before referee overrule kept it 6-0, and the Moroccan players had the look of excellent athletes who have found something unsolvable for the night. Still, the big screen showed fans late in the match, and those included Haasna, still smiling. Back when the Atlas Lionesses arrived to Australia, she had joined volunteers welcoming them to their base city at the Melbourne airport. “It was something we were so proud to do,” she said, “because we’re doing it for love.”
This story has been updated.
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