When Auckland United had the chance to step into the FIFA Women’s Champions Cup, they were delighted and proud to be able to represent Oceania as continental champions.
Some of the younger players were also hyped for a different reason – the possibility of facing European champions Arsenal.
“We were really, really excited,” Auckland defender Kris Molloy tells SheKicks.net. “We’re a very young squad too – a lot of the girls wanted to get the chance to play with some of their childhood heroes!”
Kris, now aged 29, began playing as a child herself. Her dad coached her older brother’s team, and she went along to training as a toddler: “and then I decided I could do it better than the boys, so I just started joining in.”
Since then, she has balanced football with a full-time job in a hospital as a physiotherapist, playing for teams in Australia and the USA, and now she has a small son added into the mix.
Molloy: Auckland United had hurdles to jump
Auckland United are an amateur team benefiting from as professional a set-up as the club can manage, with two or three evening training sessions per week, and the players having outside jobs or study.
It meant a lot of juggling when they found out they would have to head to China to face Wuhan Jiangda in the FIFA Women’s Champions Cup – necessitating an eight-day trip, stopping off in Shanghai for a warm-up game before heading to Wuhan to acclimatise.
“A lot of girls had to get almost like a little permission slip, so the club had drawn up a letter to get people out of school or time off work, because most girls were taking annual leave to be able to go on this trip.
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“All the girls from the Wuhan team, they were all ready to go. They’re not having to juggle those things. That was definitely something in a few people’s minds was making sure they had enough annual leave saved up and those sorts of things – lots of girls kind of sacrificing things: ‘you can’t get Christmas time off because you’ve taken time off now.’ A few different hurdles to jump.”
“We thought we could be competitive”
Auckland knew they would go into the match as underdogs, facing a fully professional Chinese team on their home ground, but they were up for the challenge, Kris says.
“We knew we had a really strong squad and I think the coaching staff have done a fantastic job over the last several years recruiting quite well and then adding in players as needed or if they had a certain position that they thought they needed to bring people in. They started thinking about this years ago…this was always the end goal for them.
“Going into it, we thought we could be very competitive, and we have some very good analysts who’d done a lot of time, a lot of research, we’ve done a lot of film study. We were going in wanting to win and thinking, yep, we definitely could – we just had to stick to the game plan.”
Game plans can always be knocked off course slightly by weather conditions, and certainly the heat and humidity in Wuhan was very different to the wet weather they had been experiencing in New Zealand before departure.
“We knew that was going to be a bit of an uphill battle for us,” admits Kris, “but we took it in stride.
“It was something we were very well prepared mentally for, that it was going to be tough. Trainings were going to be hard to match that. Everyone went in thinking it was going to be extreme conditions.”
Auckland United focused on next chance
And Auckland United put up a valiant fight against the champions of Asia, keeping them at bay until the 88th minute when a free kick found Jiang Chenjing, who managed to finish the move off.
It was frustrating and heartbreaking for Auckland in multiple ways.
“They’re very well known for their set pieces and their wide free kicks, so as a defensive line, we were quite upset that that was the way we went down, because that was our big thing going in was avoid as many as we could, and if they did get into those dangerous areas, those were the exact moments that we needed to be that one per cent better.”
Extra-time was within touching distance when that goal was scored, and it was even more disappointing when Auckland counted the chances they should have converted themselves.
“The first maybe five minutes, once we settled in, there was a good 15, 20-minute chunk there that if we had capitalised on it, I think it would have been a very different game,” says Kris. “That was a hard pill to swallow.”
Bitter as it might have been at the time, it’s also given the squad a taste of the competition – and they’re already focused on qualifying for the next opportunity to compete on the global club stage.
“That was the first thing that everyone said as soon as the game was over,” concludes Kris. “‘All right, we’ve got to re-qualify and we’ve got to come back again next year.”
