Matildas star Katrina Gorry reveals how she overcame her ‘dark place’ after birth of her daughter, Harper

Alone, and on the other side of the world, footballer Katrina Gorry walked into a fertility clinic and took her first steps toward having a baby as a single mum.

She knew her decision would change her life.

What she wasn’t banking on was that her baby girl Harper would become her secret weapon, reigniting her love of football, and propelling the midfielder back into the Matildas national team in readiness for the 2023 World Cup on home soil.

“I play for her now,” says Gorry, 31, who battled an eating disorder and waning enthusiasm for the game in the years before undergoing IVF treatment in 2020.

“For a long time, I was like, ‘You know what, I’m done with this’,” Gorry tells Australian Story.

“Then when I had her, it was almost like I was a kid again.

“She definitely reignited that dream.”

Nine weeks after Harper’s birth Gorry threw herself into training, a renewed fire in her belly.

Three months later, she played her first return game for her hometown team, the Brisbane Roar.

Then, with six-month-old Harper in her arms, she jetted off to Sweden to begin playing with Vittsjö GKI, a team in that country’s top league.

There to help Gorry and Harper settle in was Clara Markstedt, a striker on the team.

Falling in love was the last thing on Gorry’s mind.

“I just wanted to play football, enjoy my time with Harper and completely focus on us,” she says.

But Markstedt quickly became enamoured of the “confident and calm” Gorry and bewitched by Harper and before long, the couple moved in together.

Now they’re engaged, Markstedt is pregnant, and the family has moved to the UK where Gorry is playing in England’s top tier Super League with West Ham United, already notching up two Player of the Match gongs.

Fearless is the word her Matildas teammates use to describe the style of the pocket rocket they call Mini, who had the highest number of tackles — 59 — of any player in the World Cup.

On field or off, it’s an apt description.

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Forget netball, ‘I knew I wanted to be a footballer’

Football and babies. That was “all that mattered” to Gorry growing up, according to her mother, Linda Gorry.

“She just always wanted to be a mother,” Linda says.

With four siblings, a half-brother and three stepbrothers in a blended family that celebrates milestones together, Gorry’s sense of family was strong.

As was her desire to play soccer. Netball held no appeal.

Taken to try the traditional girls’ game as a six-year-old, Gorry pronounced netball boring. Then proceeded to kick the ball.

But when Gorry was let loose on a soccer field, she shone.

“Even with all the boys in the team, she was the one that was targeted,” Linda says.

“It was pretty obvious, pretty early on that she was really good.”

So obvious that at the age of 14, she was selected for the Queensland Academy of Sport.

It didn’t work out, her immaturity a barrier to the commitment required, and her scholarship was rescinded.

“You just don’t know what you want until it’s been taken away,” Gorry says. “From that moment on, I knew I wanted to be a footballer.”

She was accepted back into the academy the next year, and at 16, Gorry began the travelling life of a footballer.

Stints with Melbourne Victory, Adelaide United and Canada’s Ottawa Fury followed and in 2012, as a 19-year-old, Gorry made her debut for Australia against the then world champions Japan.

She gets emotional now thinking about it.

“Putting on the Australian jersey, singing the national anthem and yeah, just living out a dream,” she says, her voice quavering.

“You still feel that same feeling every time you step out in the field for the national team. You never take it for granted.”

But the Matildas started to feel they were being taken for granted.

The national women’s team was paid below the minimum wage, forced to squeeze other jobs into training and travelling to make ends meet.

Their pay and conditions when travelling were nothing like that of the men’s team.

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It was time to take a stand. After a strong showing at the 2015 World Cup – Gorry’s first – the team went on strike, missing a US tour.

Two months later, they signed a landmark deal.

It was a difficult time, says Gorry, but critically important to creating the crowd-wowing Matildas of today.

“It’s something we still speak about now,” she says.

“From that day forward, things have changed dramatically for the national team.”

‘I spiralled into a really hard and dark place’

That team bond was on full show in early 2016 when the Matildas knocked the qualifying matches for the Rio Olympics out of the park, winning all five games in an arduous 10-day stint.

“The feeling we had at that time was just like, ‘It doesn’t matter who’s playing, we’re the best and we’re going to win’.”

Come Rio, the Matildas made the quarterfinals — against the football-mad host country, Brazil. 

The packed stadium witnessed a thrilling match that went to a penalty shootout.

It was neck and neck when Gorry stepped up.

She could win the game.

But she missed, with Alanna Kennedy the next Matilda up. 

She missed. It was all over.

Missing her shot hit Gorry hard. It was, says Linda, “a monkey on her back” for a long time.

“I remember feeling just so defeated,” Gorry says. “It’s a feeling that I hadn’t really felt in football.”

Soon after, she was off to Japan to play with Vegalta Sendai, and years of back-to-back seasons, the pleasure and pain of social media scrutiny and being away from home began to take their toll.

“I think social media probably killed us a little bit there for a while,” she says.

“You get so caught up in what other players look like, what their strengths are and what other people are doing in the world and what they think of you,” she says.

“I just spiralled into a really hard and dark place.”

She started having body image issues and an eating disorder developed.

“We’d have to weigh in before we went to breakfast and, you could hear it across the breakfast table. ‘I’m not going to eat breakfast this morning’, or ‘I’m not eating carbs for lunch’ and things like that,” Gorry says.

“I wouldn’t like to look at myself in the mirror,” she says. “I would not want to eat. And then I’d kind of binge and then it would just be like a yo-yo effect.”

There were days she wouldn’t get out of bed.

Gorry still managed to make the World Cup team in 2019, despite injuring her ankle in the lead-up.

She didn’t play much in that tournament but the time off with injury, and being back with the national team, allowed her to take stock.

She began to talk about her eating disorder and sought help and after three years, Gorry began to recover.

“It wasn’t until I really started to speak out and decided that, you know, I still wanted to be a football player, and I was going to give it one last shot,” Gorry says.

“And in the middle of COVID, I decided to go to Norway.”

The rebirth of Katrina Gorry 

Injury struck Gorry again during her Norwegian football campaign. COVID postponed the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. And Gorry would go to bed dreaming of baby names.

It was time. Gorry walked into that fertility clinic, confiding in no-one about her plan. Not her parents with whom she is very close, not her friends or teammates.

“I didn’t want anyone to talk me out of it,” she says.

With Harper’s birth came the rebirth of Gorry. She is, says her mum, a changed human.

“[Harper] was that missing part of Katrina’s life,” Linda says.

“Once Harper came into her life, it was this fulfilment that I’ve never seen.”

Linda has had a front-row seat. When Gorry was recalled to the Matildas in 2022, the question of who would care for Harper when Gorry was on the field was quickly answered by Linda.

“Mum was like, ‘Alright, I’m coming with you’,” Gorry says.

The family-friendly vibe in the Matildas is a long way from the team’s early days, when players had to decide between representing their country or having a baby.

Gorry’s teammate Tameka Yallop also has a little girl, Harley, and fellow Matilda Charli Grant says the children’s presence added a new layer of positive culture to the team.

“If you’re having a bad day and you see the kids around, it just makes you smile immediately and also shows there’s so much more to life than just football,” Grant says.

“It really put life into perspective and we’re really grateful to have them around. Everyone loved them.”

And Australians loved the Matildas, the nation becoming transfixed by the team’s campaign for World Cup glory.

“Football in Australia has changed forever,” says Gorry, beaming as she recalls the crowds and cheers of one of the most successful sporting events in the country’s history.

Her highlight? The epic penalty shootout against France in the quarterfinal.

Some in the crowd would have recalled Gorry’s missed kick in the Rio shoot-out but few knew she was grieving the recent death of her partner, Clara’s, father.

The pressure was immense.

But as she lined up to take her kick, Gorry says the presence of Clara’s dad, Peter Markstedt, “just took over”.

“He wasn’t going to let me miss,” she says.

She scored and the crowd went wild. The upset of Rio disappeared.

“I had to get the monkey off my back and step up in a major tournament,” she says.

“I feel like I did that.”

The Matildas won that night at the end of the 20-shot tiebreaker but finished fourth in the tournament.

It was not the fairytale the Matildas had hoped for, but Gorry has her sights set firmly on the future.

Three big occasions are on the horizon.

In June, Markstedt is due to give birth, to a baby boy.

Six weeks later, barring injury and a major upset, Gorry will run onto a field in France with her Matildas teammates to launch their campaign to take home a medal at the Paris Olympics.

“I think this is going to be our year,” she says.

“I think we can really do it.”

And come 2025, Gorry and Markstedt will get married, their two children by their side.

“I never was interested in getting married,” Gorry says.

“But after I met Clara, I was like, ‘This is my girl. We’re going to do life together’.”

Australian Story returns with Katrina Gorry’s story The Making of Mini tonight, 8:00pm, on ABCTV and ABC iview.

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