An equally gifted footballer, Perry made her worldwide debut at 16 – taking part in her first match for Australia in opposition to Hong Kong in 2007.
The sensible cricket allrounder made her first World Cup look in the course of the 2011 event in Germany, scoring the Matildas’ solely objective within the 3-1 quarter-final loss to Sweden.
The 32-year-old earned 18 caps and scored three objectives for Australia between 2007 and 2012.
Primarily a defender, Perry additionally loved a glittering profession in home soccer taking part in for Central Coast Mariners, Canberra United and Sydney FC with teammates Kerr and Caitlin Foord.
She competed on the Worldwide Girls’s Membership Championship with Sydney FC in 2013, when the squad defeated Japan’s WE League membership NTV Beleza 1-0 however misplaced 3-2 to Chelsea.
However as her sporting paths crossed, she sacrificed her soccer trajectory for the bat-and-ball sport together with her cricketing profession exploding into superstardom from 2014.
Perry went on to win eight world titles with Australia, 11 Girls’s Nationwide Cricket League championships with NSW, and two Girls’s Massive Bash League titles with the Sydney Sixers.
She is now delighted to see her former Matildas team-mates take the soccer world – and the Australian sporting public – by storm.
“I do not suppose we have ever actually seen something like this,” Perry mentioned on Thursday. “The extent that they are taking part in at, the type that they are taking part in, the superb leisure that they’re.
“Simply to see what these ladies have achieved for not solely their group however for this sport and for ladies’s sport – it is simply been an exceptional event.”
Perry didn’t need to neglect the achievements made by feminine athletes earlier than the Matildas’ World Cup fever swept the nation.
“There’s a number of precedent for this,” she mentioned. “Historically, the Girls’s Massive Bash League has been the fourth most-watched sporting competitors within the nation – it appears a very long time in the past however again in 2020 we had 86,000 on the MCG.
“It has been a extremely regular evolution for ladies’s sport for an extended time period. “[General society] is shifting according to an actual push in direction of equality but additionally how a lot we worth the unimaginable ability and endeavour of all of our feminine athletes and what they’re capable of obtain.”
Perry hopes the momentum across the World Cup may help the expansion of home competitions.
“We have a tremendous platform to be extra profitable and have extra of a mark on the sporting panorama in Australia,” she mentioned. “The product is there. Now it is nearly offering a platform for followers to have the ability to come alongside and have a extremely satisfying time.
“The following frontier for us is to guarantee that we’re capable of fill these stadiums.”
Perry is at present recovering from a knee damage sustained final month in Eire and meant she was withdrawn from the Hundred however is hopeful of being prepared for the beginning of the home season in late September.
