Sometimes, the only way to get noticed is to be controversial, to be out of the ordinary. Stir it up, cause a fuss, rip up the rule book and watch the masses react.
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| Australia's women's football team poses with a nude calendar produced to promote women's soccer in Australia in Sydney in November 1999 |
In the autumn of 1999, Katrina Boyd and her teammates assembled at the Australian Institute of Sport for a photo shoot they all knew would make headlines. There was a storm brewing in the Australian capital and the country's women's football team was in the eye of it. "We wanted to rock the boat," Boyd tells CNN Sport.
With a home Olympics on the horizon, Australia's women's football team, better known as the Matildas, needed money to help prepare for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity on home soil.
Though they were international athletes, for the majority of players it was a struggle to work, train and survive. There were no sponsors, few fans, and little money to be made from the beautiful game.
Just months earlier they had competed at the 1999 Women's World Cup, a tournament still regarded as instrumental in the advancement of the women's game, to little fanfare. The Matildas needed to, somehow, enter the nation's consciousness.
The solution? After a seed was sown at a boozy party in 1999, 12 players agreed to pose nude for a black and white calendar which would go on sale in December of that year.
Nudity did not bother Boyd, who would go on to become Miss August in the calendar that would sell, in her words, "s**tloads."
As she waited for her turn to be photographed, she seated herself on the stage and made idle chit-chat with the photographer to pass away the time. That she was naked was of little concern to the-then 27-year-old.
"It was all done very tastefully, at no time did we feel preyed upon, no-one felt that we were just objects," Boyd, speaking from her Brisbane home, remembers.
"It was no different to the changing rooms. Some girls would shower in their bras and undies and those sorts of girls would never put themselves on the calendar. Pretty much the girls who were in the calendar were the same girls who didn't mind getting their gear off, having a shower, getting dressed and moving on."
These weren't coy images. There were full frontal poses, no props hiding breasts. Needless to say, the press conference for the launch of the calendar was packed with journalists.
"Whatever next?" one Sydney columnist wrote, according to Sports Illustrated. "A lap dance of honor at the Olympics? A free trip to a massage parlor with every season ticket?"
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| Striker Boyd made 28 appearances for the Matildas |
According to reports, the original print run of 5,000 copies was increased to 45,000 on the strength of pre-publication publicity.
There were those who argued that women should not have to use their bodies to sell their sport, let alone to raise funds to represent their country. But the players themselves believed they were portraying images of strong, powerful women.
At the time, Boyd told journalists "if people want to call it porn, that's their problem," and 20 years on the Australian, who describes herself as an "out there kind of person," still has no regrets, even though it was her picture which proved to be one of the most controversial.
"I did a full frontal. People were up in arms," says Boyd, now a dog trainer.
"The photographer just said: '(Are) there things you're happy to do?' I was like 'whatever' and they said, 'how about you just stand?' and I went 'yeah, go for it.' I just don't care about nudity.
"It rocked the boat a little bit over here, but we did get a bit of coverage and the word Matilda started to mean something, though probably not for the reasons we wanted.
"It was a bit of fun, it got us our 15 minutes of fame which, for us putting in a lot of groundwork, training hard, doing everything, was nice.
"I wasn't surprised by the negative reaction. That would still happen today. We were more surprised by how much people were into it, but half of them were blokes, of course.
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| Matildas fans show their support during the Cup of Nations match between Australia and Argentina |
Boyd and her contemporaries grew up in an Australia where there was no financial reward for its female footballers. When she first joined the national set-up, she had to pay AUS $500 [$346] to train with the squad at the Australian Institute of Sport in Canberra.
Early into Boyd's international career, the Australian Women's Soccer Association (AWSA) began to take care of travel costs for the squad, but there were still occasions when she and her teammates would have to decline playing international football purely for financial reasons.
"You didn't get any money while you were away," explains Boyd, who worked in corporate banking during the majority of her time with the Matildas, often taking unpaid leave to represent the green and gold.
"My partner had to pay for every trip. She's nine years older than me and captained Australia. There were amazing players back in her time who couldn't do anything because they couldn't afford to do it."
Against such a backdrop, profits from what proved to be an in-demand calendar would have helped the Matildas focus more on football in an Olympic year, but according to Boyd they received little financial reward for their efforts.
"What happened after the calendar was more of a negative because we didn't get the funds from this calendar which we were supposed to," she says.
But the calendar certainly put the Matildas on the map. "You could get in any cab in Sydney and the cabbie would have heard of the Matildas, because of this calendar," Moya Dodd, a former Matildas player, told ABC News last year.
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| Kerr poses with a fan after the 2019 Cup of Nations match between Australia and South Korea |
A reported 10,000 fans watched the Matildas play China at the Sydney Football Stadium in June for an Olympic warm-up match -- but two defeats and a draw at Sydney 2000 meant the hosts did not progress beyond the group stages. Thereafter, interest in the team began to drop.
"Did we get what we ultimately wanted out of it? Probably no," admits Boyd.
"Something like that is never going to be long-term. We couldn't back up that calendar with our football at the time. We were never in a position to throw out a massive calendar like that and also back it up on the field. I guess that would've been the ultimate, if we could've still got results and had that calendar."
The Matildas' calendar was a fleeting solution to a decades-old problem. Recognition for female footballers.
After all, the opening paragraph in the Sun-Herald following Australia's first official international fixture on October 7, 1979, read: "The first thing you notice about a women's soccer match is the players. They ARE feminine."
As was the case around the world, women's football in Australia suffered from chauvinistic brush-offs for almost a century.
Though around 10,000 fans reportedly watched North Brisbane defeat South Brisbane 2-0 at the Brisbane Cricket Ground in 1921 when the men were away at war, it wasn't until the 1970s, with the foundation of a national championship and the AWSA, that the building blocks for today's successes were laid.
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