By the time Alanna Kennedy gets to the end of her sentence, listing all the things the Matildas did well in their 3-2 loss to Nigeria on Thursday night, she is out of breath, glassy-eyed and wants to be anywhere else but here.
The central defender is the first to pass through the mixed zone beneath the eerily quiet Brisbane Stadium; the first sacrificial lamb thrown to a ravenous media pack that asks her to dissect and analyse and justify the game when all she wants to do is cry.
“I just think it was moments,” she says professionally, looking past dozens of pairs of pecking eyes at the cold grey wall behind us.
“There was [a] big moment right before half-time where we gave up a goal. Obviously the third goal was a moment.
“But for majority of the game, we played well. We possessed the ball well, we moved them around a lot, we created chances and put them under a lot of pressure in their back third.”
This is where she takes the quivering half-breath, her voice beginning to catch in her throat.
The hot tears that spilled down her cheeks moments earlier in the dressing-room are threatening to flood back and she needs to default to the script they’ve all memorised for moments like this.
“It’s obviously a frustrating result, but there’s a lot of positives to take out of the game,” she says.
And she’s right, there were a lot of positives.
Australia dominated Nigeria on paper: they had 28 shots to 11, 15 corners to 2, 467 passes to 270, 27 final-third entries to 6, and 43 touches in the opposition box to 15.
They scored the opening goal at the end of a blossoming first half, with Emily Van Egmond — who’d come in to replace the concussed Mary Fowler — nonchalantly guiding the ball into the net following a surgical Caitlin Foord pass.
Australia held onto the ball well and recycled it patiently, pulling Nigeria back and forth across the field, trying to tempt them out of their structure.
Hayley Raso and Cortnee Vine found spaces to dart into, winning corner after corner after corner, while Foord looked sharp on the turn with the ball at her feet.
Tony Gustavsson highlighted as much afterwards, armed with his traditional piece of paper scribbled with quick statistics spat out from his analyst’s computer.
“If you look at our attacking game … we created enough chances to score even more goals,” he said matter-of-factly.
“If you look at some of the stats, we had double the amount of final-third entries than our average. We had double the amount of box entries than on average. We had 28 shots, we scored two goals.
“So our attacking game was much, much improved compared to the Ireland game, which I’m happy about.”
He’s right. Kennedy is right. They’re all right. But what does any of that matter when you lost the only number that counts?
What data is available to capture the devastation of that, and the fear of what could happen next? What do you do when the controllables become uncontrollable?
Tournament football is like a fun-house mirror — it warps and magnifies and refracts, sometimes bending entire games out of shape.
What looked like a dominant performance from Australia now feels like one of their most uneasy in recent months.
Triangulated through the prism of the final score, the match took on new awkward angles and uncomfortable questions: how much has Australia inflated its expectations of this team? How confident are we really that they can manage their way through this temporary injury crisis? How should we respond to the sudden reminder that this team’s tournament hopes can still fall victim to fumbling human error or sheer, dumb luck?
If Ellie Carpenter had positioned her leg slightly differently, would the cross from Rasheedat Ajibade have spun off her in the way that it did to arc perfectly onto the foot of Uchenna Kanu at the back post?
If Emily van Egmond had climbed just a little higher in the air to head a Nigerian corner further up the field, would it have fallen to Ajibade, whose own head speared it towards the back post for Osinachi Ohale to bundle into the net?
If Mackenzie Arnold had called a little more loudly, would Kennedy have headed the ball beyond them both, inviting Asisat Oshoala to nip in between and neatly score Nigeria’s third?
Or were the moments that lost Australia this game actually found elsewhere — in the places our funhouse-mirror eyes cannot see?
Were they in the second balls that Kyra Cooney-Cross and Katrina Gorry kept missing through midfield, falling instead to Nigerian feet to quickly launch forward in transition?
Were they in the inches of air that carried the dozens of shots from Foord and Vine and Raso and Gorry over the crossbar instead of under it?
Were they in the decisions Gustavsson made to bring on a defender in place of an attacker, only to turn a defender into an attacker, and then to bring on an actual attacker when it was all but too late?
Is there any point in asking these questions when the final group game is three days away and it’s suddenly changed from a formality to a must-win and what seemed like a group the Matildas could ease through is now one they could barely make it out of?
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Kennedy is standing here holding back tears and trying not to think about all of that.
“I think, for us, we’ll look at [tonight] as a positive; we’ll use that mentality,” she says, as you do in these moments when the alternative is too grim to consider.
“Obviously the game moves quickly, so you have to move on from those moments. To look back on, it’s disappointing, but ultimately the pressure we put them under and the mentality we had towards the end of the game was unreal from the girls.
“We’re looking to keep that same positive mentality moving to the Canada game.”
You sense she is saying these things to convince herself as much as to convince the rest of us.
After coming into this tournament riding a wave of positivity — especially compared to the other teams in their group — the Matildas are teetering on the edge of something deep and dark and vastly cold.
They might recycle their lines about focusing on the football, blocking out the noise, not letting themselves be overwhelmed by the pressure of all this.
But Thursday’s loss against Nigeria told a very different story, just as Kennedy’s face did.
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