Ian Warden: Matildas' perfect imperfections fuel World Cup delirium

Yes it's a fever - but we're not sick, we're just in love.

This fever has lots of the sweetly irrational qualities of being feverishly in love. Australians, are you in your feverishness struggling to put into words the delight the Matildas are giving you?

Well, if you're finding there's a smile on your face/for the whole human race and that all the music of life seems to be/just like a bell that is ringing for thee then you're exhibiting the symptoms diagnosed in Lerner and Loewe's classic show song Almost Like Being In Love.

But of course the fevers induced by the World Cup and by a favourite football team are not the same (although the deliriums and irrationalities are close cousins) as the fevers caused by romantic love.

So for example, Australians' Matilda-delirium has, because the Matildas are playing for our nation, the powerful elements of patriotism (another irrational fever) about it.

Then, methinks, this World Cup Fever has some other elusive nuances to it. "What can they be, these nuances?" the thinking man asks himself. He is perplexed if, usually priding himself on the superiority of his intellect, he is discombobulated to find himself infected by the same fever sweeping through the lumpenproletariat at large.

My World Cup delirium has something to do with seeing beloved soccer-football (famously called "The Beautiful Game") now being so splendidly embraced, watched, played by women and girls.

Old blokes (and this columnist is a gnarled man of 77) who have loved the game all of their lives rejoice to find it now floating women's boats. Thirty-two nations (32!) sent teams of soccer-playing women to this World Cup.

Then (still trying to fully diagnose this present fever) there is something about women's football, at its best, that makes it distinctively, differently (different from men's football at its best) enthralling to watch.

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I'm not sure what that "something" is, but here is one of my provisional guesses.

Men's football at its excellent best (as played in, say, England's vaunted Premier League) has a thrilling perfection about it. Every elite man, every athlete-Adonis who trots out to play in a Premiership match is a kind of football god.

He is god-like in his skillfulness. In the whole 95 minutes of a match you will rarely see him make an unforced error and will only see him make precious few forced errors forced upon him by speeds and skills of the gods he is playing against.

All this is all very sublime, in its way.

And yet, somehow, there is something about the perfection of the best men's football that is a little (only a little) alienating for the rest of us. When we watch it we are watching gods do things we mortals couldn't possibly do.

Women's football by contrast (even the very best of it being played now in this World Cup) is engagingly imperfect. With exceptions, elite women players are not, yet, half as skilled as their elite brothers.

These World Cup women do quite a lot of miscued booting of the football in directions the kicker never intended. Taking penalties from a spot 11 metres from the goal, some of the best women footballers of this World Cup are missing the goal completely.

Women's football goalkeepers are, by comparison with the towering agile Goliaths who play in goal in the Premier League, excitingly fallible. They, the women, often even drop the ball.

My point is that even the very best female footballers, playing their football, seem engagingly a bit like the rest of us. All mortal humans drop the ball occasionally. Watching these women play, we feel we, too, if we really truly try, can hope one day to play as well as they do.

Footballing children are especially likely to think this. That's why Matildas' fandom is especially delirious among the young, their shrill pre-pubescent voices giving Matilda-match crowds their excitingly high-pitched, window-rattling timbre.

Then there is the way that while male players are mostly emotionally manly (i.e. corked up), women players openly show such a range of emotions, including tears of joy and tears of distress.

In this way women players (not consciously acting, that's not what I mean) give an added theatricality to the drama of football matches. We love that.

Aesthetically, too, this World Cup is proving to be a treat.

Aesthetic highlights have included the Japanese playing in an aesthetically pleasing strip of pale pink and subdued lilac.

Teams' colours are very important to an aesthete's sporting fandom. No sensitive fan can get enthusiastic about the Netherlands' team, aesthetically let down by its nondescript strip of curdled tangerine.

Then, still with World Cup aesthetics, there's been the playing of some daytime matches in Dunedin's indoor Forsyth Barr stadium so beautifully illuminated by soft, muted, palely greenish sunlight washing in through the stadium's roof of transparent ethylene tetrafluoroethylene. The loveliness!

Canberra's current debate about a new stadium must include a desire to imitate Dunedin stadium's inspired example so as to make theatrically lovely use of Canberra's famously pure, clear, federal capital natural light.

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