You couldn't see it at first. 

As the broadcast camera slowly panned across the sweat-soaked players of Australia and Indonesia, lining up to bump fists and shake hands following Friday's opening group game of the Asian Cup, there was another, smaller line forming just off-screen.

In the cool, lengthening shadows of the Mumbai Football Arena, several Indonesian players waited patiently, like fans at a meet-and-greet, to get their photo taken with Sam Kerr.

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The Matildas captain had just scored five of Australia's 18 goals – their biggest-ever haul in an Asian competition and one of the biggest score-lines ever recorded in international women's football – but you wouldn't have known it from the grins that lit up the young players' faces or the gentle bows of respect they showed.

Such is the status of the player who has now become Australia's all-time leading goal-scorer, galloping past Socceroos legend Tim Cahill's previous record of 50 to currently sit at 54.

That she did so in fewer games than Cahill, all the while overcoming countless other barriers that women footballers face throughout their careers, is a testament to just where Kerr sits – or ought to sit – in conversations about Australia's greatest-ever players.

It's a shame, then, that this wasn't the major talking point in the afterglow of Friday's match.

Instead, the post-mortems scythed through head coach Tony Gustavsson's squad selection and rotations: the benefit of fielding his strongest starting XI against the tournament's lowest-ranked side, the worth of substituting seasoned veterans in place of inexperienced youngsters, and what, if anything, can be learned from an 18-0 carnage.

"I'm really disappointed tonight, if anything," former Matilda Georgia Yeoman-Dale said on the broadcast within minutes of the final whistle. "Fantastic, we're scoring a lot of goals, but with what team?"

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As it turns out, a team filled with power, precision, and potential. In fact, beneath the criticism and the warped score-line, we learned a lot about Australia from their defeat of Indonesia.

We learned that 24-year-old Clare Wheeler, who was called up to the side in the post-Tokyo friendlies, looks an ever-surer mainstay in the Matildas fold after a commanding, metronomic game at the base of midfield.

We learned that both Mary Fowler and Emily Van Egmond are two complementary central lynch-pins through whom most of Australia's best and most elegant attacks unfold.

We learned that both Courtney Nevin and debutant Holly McNamara provide depth at left back and left wing in the absence of Steph Catley and Caitlin Foord.

And we learned that Gustavsson has more thorough plans for 1.76m centre-back Alanna Kennedy in a tournament where height is a particular advantage.

Overall, it was exactly the kind of performance the Matildas sorely needed after a string of difficult friendlies over the past few months: a full demonstration of the attack-minded, "high-octane" style they've become known for but struggled to display since Tokyo.

It was also a game that, as Gustavsson said afterwards, was useful to allow a number of players to reintegrate back into the team and return to fitness following fragmented, inconsistent minutes and seasons elsewhere.

Few could fault his reasoning, then, for introducing three veteran players – Aivi Luik, Tameka Yallop, and Kyah Simon – at half-time when Australia was leading 9-0. This game was as much about winning as it was about planning for the next, and the next, and the next.

But the player selections weren't just a matter of sports science and load management. It was also, according to Kerr, a matter of respect.

"I think we've shown the ultimate respect to Indonesia today by coming out with our best team," she said post-match.

"We scouted them before the game and knew they had some tricky players, and we weren't going to take it lightly. This is the Asian Cup and we're here to get as far as we can in the tournament."

Gustavsson shared the sentiment: "I think there are plenty of reasons [for the squad choice]: one is that it's an opening game of the tournament and it's very important to set the tone for a team to get off on a good start.

"I've been in a similar situation before as a coach going into a tournament against a lower-ranked team and know how important it is to treat that team with respect, but also show respect to our values and our standards."

Indeed, while it was a trial by fire for the Indonesians, head coach Rudy Eka Priyambada said afterwards that the game provided the team with a wealth of lessons they may otherwise not have learned: opportunities to grow into a better future version of themselves.

To treat it as little more than a training match, then, is not only antithetical to the purpose of tournament football. It also arguably undermines Australia's responsibility as a leading Asian nation in the women's game to set an example and a standard for others to follow.

"This was the first game for us in 33 years," he told media. "We have to develop our football — women's football — especially in Indonesia.

"We know our weaknesses, so we have to fix those for the next game. When they were having the ball, more patience – don't be panicked – something like that.

"The gap is [the] quality of the player. Lots of players in Australia, they play in Europe and they have their own league. We just started our league two years ago, and then because this pandemic happened, we didn't have a league. I think we have to develop women's football in Indonesia much better.

"We have young players. For this event, we have to learn: we want to learn from this event for the future."

And that is perhaps the other, wider lesson that can be learned from these games: that showing of respect in such lop-sided dynamics acknowledges both where one is and where one could be.

That feeling is echoed in another of Gustavsson's mottos — "I love you for who you are but I'm going to treat you for who you can become" — and shown in both Kerr's performance on the field and the time she took to meet her opponents separately afterwards.

Because Kerr knows what it's like to start from the bottom. While you couldn't draw a neater line from her first goal for Australia to her record-breaking half-century yesterday, there is another line between those two points that is more tangled and frayed, filled with injuries and interruptions, frustrations and fatigue.

That's the hidden line — the bit just off-screen — where the biggest lessons of all are often learned: humility, patience, perseverance, respect.

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We've seen the decade-long path it's taken her to get to this point, standing head-and-shoulders above most players in the game just as Australia stands above most nations at the Asian Cup.

But it took time to get there. It took commitment, opportunities, and investment to turn the buzzing, stumbling 16-year old who scored her first Matildas goal in 2010 to the sharpened, clinical, world-famous striker who just breezed past 50 a decade later.

Indonesia is at the start of that journey. Australia is in the fullest swing of theirs.

There is plenty more to be said for the purposes of games and tournaments like this, for the gaps and gulfs they open or close, and for who benefits or who misses out. But if anything can be learned from the 92 minutes in Mumbai on Friday, it's that sometimes, the most important lessons aren't always obvious, nor are they always meant for us.