Tony Gustavsson sits alone at the post-match press conference table in Pune. He's hunched, his chest caved in, his elbows resting heavily on the table in front of him.

He's usually joined by one of his players: his captain Sam Kerr, his vice-captain Steph Catley or a stand-out performer from the earlier match. But not today.

The camera used to record the Women's Asian Cup debriefs sits several metres back from the chairs and microphones, making the people who sit there look smaller than they are.

Gustavsson appears smaller still. He gazes out from over his white mask with weary, distant eyes. It's half an hour after the Matildas have been knocked out of the quarterfinal by South Korea and he knows what happens next.

"I've been around long enough, for two decades, to know that it's going to be on me now," he says calmly.

"And that's fair. It's OK. That's what it should be in this business.

"I take full ownership of the result tonight. I'm happy [for people] to criticise me, which I think is fair, but I also hope they do that by looking at the performances as well, so it's a fair criticism.

"Am I the person for the job? It's not my job to say. What I can promise is that I've been around long enough to come back from a situation like this and learn from it and do better. And that's what I'm going to do, if I get the chance to do it."

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He hasn't checked the headlines or the comment threads but he knows what this means.

And there is no denying it: this has been a failure on every metric, by every standard and expectation. It's the first time Australia have been knocked out at this stage of the Asian Cup; a title that Gustavsson, his players, and Football Australia said they wanted to win.

And it's true: they did want it. But wanting and getting are not the same thing, and the gap between the two has never felt wider than what it is now.

They are a team many believe are among the best in the world; a team that could lift football's biggest trophy of all. Yet this past week in India has shown they are currently not even the best in Asia, and that their cabinet remains startlingly bare.

"Absolutely devastating and shocking result, right there," Matildas player and broadcast pundit Chloe Logarzo says as the post-game excavation of the rubble begins.

"It's a disaster," commentator Andy Harper agrees.

"He backed himself into a corner, in my opinion, going to this tournament with a full-strength squad; the best in Asia. And he needed to win it. Anything less than a final is totally unacceptable with this squad.

The higher the flight, it seems, the further the fall.

A moment a decade in the making

In the end, it was decided – as football so often is – by a single moment.

South Korean midfielder Ji So-Yun needed just one touch to end Australia's hopes of securing their first Asian Cup trophy in over a decade.

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It seemed to happen in slow motion and yet all at once, like the collapse of a building: in the space of a breath, the ball had disappeared from the toe of Ji's boot, sailing so hard and flat into the far corner of Lydia Williams' net that the world around it seemed to break, like the air itself had been cloven in two.

In that one moment, the trajectories of these two nations ricocheted off each other, spinning in the directions that each expected the other to be going after this quarterfinal. It wasn't what the data, the history, the stories we told ourselves had predicted: this wasn't the way things were supposed to go.

And yet, when you strip it all down – when you draw the curtain back and let the light in – this moment, this match, and this tournament are perhaps not so unexpected after all.

Ji's goal may be the one we remember, but it was not a moment in isolation; it was the end point in a series of moments, the latest twang in the strings of history, the hurricane that began as a flap of a butterfly wing some time ago.

Last November, Football Australia organised an end-of-year media round table at its Sydney headquarters.

It was the first time Gustavsson had been on Australian soil since beginning his tenure in January and media were invited to meet him face-to-face.

FA chief executive James Johnson was there, too. The purpose of the round table was two-fold: to wrap up the past 12 months for the Matildas and to provide an opportunity to ask questions of both Johnson and Gustavsson in a behind-closed-doors setting.

Johnson began the meeting by listing some of the main achievements of the federation throughout 2021: major sponsorship deals with the Commonwealth Bank and Cadbury, record-breaking viewership numbers in stadiums and on television, the team's historic fourth-placed finish at the Tokyo Olympics, the successful staging of friendlies in Sydney in the midst of the pandemic.

Gustavsson sat at ease next to him as Johnson spoke, his crisp white Matildas-branded polo glowing in the mid-morning light streaming through the windows overlooking the harbour. A camera crew was circling the room, capturing footage of the various attendees reacting to Johnson's positive opening remarks.

On the surface, it all looked so easy and bright. But then the mood changed.

The camera crew was asked to leave the room, closing the door behind them. Recordings were off-limits, phones and laptops put away.

Gustavsson leaned forward and put his hands on the table; his voice became clearer, his expression open and honest.

The conversation that occurred over the next hour was as difficult as it was overdue: while we may want the Matildas to be world-beaters, the reality is that right now, they simply are not.

And if you look at their own history, they never really have been.

Pulling back the curtain

This Asian Cup campaign – and, indeed, the past 12 months – has been a microcosm of the last decade of football for the Matildas.

Much of the criticism of Gustavsson's tenure in the past few days has centred around his objective record: 20 games, six wins, four draws, 10 losses. But what's missing from these raw statistics is context.

Of the 20 games played under Gustavsson so far, 13 of them (or 65 per cent) have been against teams ranked inside the top 10. The Matildas, currently ranked 11th, have won two of those (against Brazil and Great Britain), drawn four, and lost 7.

Our record against better-ranked teams over the past year (which has also included two major tournaments, the Olympics and Asian Cup), then, has been poor: a win ratio of just 15 per cent.

What we forget, though, is it has always been poor – especially at major tournaments.

Between 2011 and 2020, Australia played a total of 123 games under the tenure of five different head coaches. 42 of those matches or (34 per cent) came against opponents who were ranked inside the top 10 at the time. Just over half of those (22) were friendlies, while the other half (20) were tournament games.

And while the Matildas won 16 and drew five of those 42 games for a win ratio of 38 per cent, just three of those came in major tournaments: once against Norway at the 2011 World Cup and twice against Brazil at the 2015 and 2019 World Cups. A tournament win ratio, in other words, of 15 per cent.

Digging even further down, results against top-five-ranked nations are even more glaring. Of the 21 games played against the world's best five teams across this decade, Australia won just twice (Japan in 2016 and the USA in 2017).

However, this 2016/17 period was anomalous for the Matildas. Their peak was inversely mirrored by the troughs of the teams they defeated, primarily in friendlies and against nations in various stages of rebuild.

Australia recorded seven of their 16 top-10 wins in this period, against teams like Brazil, Japan, and the USA – all of whom were dipping in form as they transitioned from one generation of players to the next, seen at that pivotal Tournament of Nations competition in 2017.

It was unfortunate timing that Australia began to pay attention to the Matildas at this exact moment, when the team was on top of the world, reaching their highest ever ranking of fourth soon afterwards.

Comparatively, in the year since Gustavsson has been at the helm, nine of Australia's 20 games (45 per cent) have featured top-five opponents: the USA, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands.

In those games — three of which took place at the Tokyo Olympics — the Matildas recorded zero wins and three draws. Unlike the past decade, though, Australia has not had a proportional buffer of games against lower-ranked nations to smooth out their lacklustre performances against higher-ranked sides.

That is, until they got to India, which compressed all of this into a single week: easy wins against minnow opponents papering over deeper cracks that the better-ranked South Korea exposed. Ultimately, this tournament and this past year have seen a decade's worth of results flash before our eyes.

In the cold light of their own history, then – stripped of the romantic storylines, the memorable triumphs, the emotion and the expectation that has been woven around these players and this team – the Matildas' recent struggles are simply a reflection of what has almost always been the case.

This was Gustavsson's message at that round-table meeting. And while it was behind closed doors, none of this is a secret. It's all there, online and in print; the data waiting to tell the real story for those who want to look for it. The past year has simply magnified what the past decade has kept hidden, or that we have chosen not to see.

So why does this Asian Cup moment feel different? Why has every loss Australia has experienced recently feel like so much more than that?

As their own bare-bones past shows, it's not the Matildas who have changed.

We have.

Where are we, and where do we go from here?

This is the hidden weight that Gustavsson, his players and the entire national team staff are having to carry: the burden of the expectations we — including in the media — have been piling upon them for the past decade.

Heightened by the self-consciousness of hosting a World Cup, the meteoric rise of some of its star players like Sam Kerr and Ellie Carpenter, and the realisation that the rest of the world is getting better faster than we are, the past year — culminating in this Asian Cup exit — has delivered a reckoning that has been long overdue.

It has also exposed the fact that there are two competing versions of the Matildas: the team whose purpose lies in results on the field and the team whose purpose lies somewhere beyond it.

They are a team of footballers, yes, but they are also a team of leaders; of idols; of relatable, likeable, inspiring women who have emerged, against the odds, to capture the imagination of a nation. Both versions are valid and valuable and open to critique in their own ways.

Sometimes – the 2010 Asian Cup final win, the defeat of Brazil at the 2015 World Cup, the first victory over the USA in 2017 – those two parallel identities align, particularly when they feed into Australia's "never say die" spirit.

But most of the time, they haven't, despite how badly we might want them to.

This is Gustavsson's other balancing act. He is not just managing a group of players, or a team of coaches, or the sometimes-contradictory FA demands of short-term results with long-term rebuilds.

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He is also finding a way to balance the reality of the Matildas with our idea of them; to navigate the volcanic emotions we have projected, consciously or otherwise, onto this team; to try and plot the course from where they are to where we want them to be.

Maybe that's why this Asian Cup defeat – where the distance between those two things seems wider than ever – feels different, and why Gustavsson is the one being blamed.

It is easy to point the finger at a single person, particularly one who has signed up for moments like this. But it is increasingly difficult to justify when you see that all Gustavsson has done is show us what was already there.

Australia's game against South Korea was a kind of Rorschach test in that way, revealing more about us than it did about the team out on that field in Pune.

Some saw a group of desperate, panicked individuals bereft of ideas or progress. Others saw a coaching system that failed to get the best out of untapped talent and who missed the opportunity to blood young players. Others still saw an ebb-and-flow between two evolving sides led by talismanic figures; one who took her chances and the other who did not.

How we interpreted the match is how we interpret the Matildas now and into the future: who they are and who they could, or should, become.

While it's tempting to write emotionally about what's happened, to lament and to scold and to bay for blood, it is precisely these things – the feelings, the stories, the hypotheticals, the imagined possibilities – that have led us here: to this chasm between expectation and reality.

It's one that is bending the players to breaking point and one which is turning the community away from instead of toward them.

So what happens now, with just 18 months before the biggest spotlight of all is back upon Australian football and the team who, for better or worse, represents it?

They do what they've been doing all year: learn, adapt, and get one day better. They figure out where they are and prepare for where they want to go.

Gustavsson reviews his tactics and refines his style. The federation provides more funding for camps and friendlies at both senior and junior level. Clubs continue to offer players, particularly the young or still emerging, the best environments possible to help them grow. And fans and media continue to watch and think and talk about it all.

Because while the Matildas may be statistically average, they are not ordinary. The stories we have been telling about them are not unfounded or useless; they are still filled with spirit and talent and potential.

The Matildas' performances may not have matched the idea we have of them yet, but that doesn't mean they never will.

And as painful as it has been, the past year has helped Australia reckon with the first part. Only time will tell whether the man sitting alone at that table in Pune is given enough time to help us achieve the second.