Caitlin Murray is a general editor for ESPN.com. She has reported on and written about soccer for The New York Times, The Guardian, Yahoo Sports, Fox Sports, the Associated Press, and others.
She authored a book about the history of the U.S. women's national team called "The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer," which made "best of" lists in Vanity Fair, The Financial Times, NPR and The Los Angeles Times. On Twitter and Instagram, she's @caitlinmurr.
SYDNEY, Australia -- When two-time Women's World Cup winning coach Jill Ellis watches Australia during this tournament, she can't help but see similarities between the Matildas and her U.S. teams that won it all in 2015 and 2019.
That's because Australia's head coach, Tony Gustavsson, was an assistant coach for the U.S. women's national team during those two previous World Cups, with he and Ellis working together closely throughout.
Gustavsson, now in his first international head-coaching job, has steered Australia to the team's first semifinal of a World Cup. Ellis told ESPN she isn't surprised at all -- Australia's final match before the World Cup convinced her that Gustavsson and the Matildas would go far.
"I watched them play against France in the warm-up game, and I remember going, 'This is a well-oiled machine. They're going to make a deep run in this tournament,'" Ellis said. "You could just see it -- the way they stepped together and moved together. It just reminded me a lot of our team in 2019. We were a very well-oiled machine, prepared for any situation."
The Matildas will face England in Sydney on Wednesday for what may be the biggest match in the history of Australian soccer. And in some ways -- on paper, at least -- Gustavsson may seem like an unlikely leader to bring the Matildas to this pivotal point.
The bulk of Gustavsson's résumé includes head-coaching gigs at smaller clubs in Sweden, and prior to taking over the Matildas, he had never led a national team. But his time as an assistant working with Ellis and the USWNT has been crucial for his own development as a coach, as well as his understanding of what it takes to win a tournament like the World Cup.
Asked by ESPN about his time with the USWNT, he credited the experience with guiding him during this tournament.
"Those experiences were extremely valuable in learning tournament football -- it's very different than week in, week out in a league," Gustavsson said. "I've been a club coach as well, but playing tournaments is completely different. It's about finding a way to win in the game right in front of you."
Gustavsson added that the learning never stops. "I'm probably going to learn a lot from tomorrow's game as well," he said of Wednesday's semifinal. "If I look back from 2019 to where I am now, my mantra is I want to get better every day, not just one day older. I sit here one day older, but hopefully one day better as well."
Ellis and Gustavsson still keep in touch regularly and they even chatted for a bit in Brisbane, where Australia pushed past France on penalty kicks in the quarterfinal, she told ESPN.
"I see a lot of similarities in their journey, and we talked about that," Ellis said, noting that the U.S. team needed to be rebuilt after a disappointing 2016 Olympics -- a process Gustavsson helped execute. "In terms of having to build a team after 2016, the decision was to open the team up, experiment more -- we knew it was going to be hard and challenging and we were going to take a lot of criticism. He's gone through a similar experience."
Indeed, it wasn't a smooth road for Gustavsson ahead of this World Cup. There were humbling stretches, like three consecutive losses to Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in 2021. There was a 7-0 loss to Spain last year, one of the Matildas' worst losses in history.
But through it all, Gustavsson was following the same playbook he used with Ellis with the USWNT before the 2019 tournament: building depth by calling in younger, less proven players and making tactical tweaks so the players could be more adaptable depending on the scenario.
