Sam Kerr is standing by herself in the middle of the Sydney Football Stadium pitch.
Her hands are on her hips and her gaze is distant as the 22,000-strong crowd slowly empties into the rainy evening.
Three of her Matildas teammates are standing a few metres away, wrapped up in large winter coats.
They exchange a few words with one another and then go quiet again, still coming to terms with what's just happened — and what's happening.
Nobody talks to Kerr. They know that what she needs in these moments is to be left alone.
A few minutes later, they all gather in a circle. Kerr stands back from the interlocking arms for a few moments, gathering herself, before joining in.
They've just lost 2-1 to Canada, their second consecutive loss to the Olympic gold medallists in this September window after going down 1-0 in Brisbane on Saturday.
She has been here more times than she'd like over the past 18 months, staring into the faces of her defeated and deflated national team members.
Sam Kerr is not used to losing. She did it only a handful of times last season with Chelsea, after all: once in the Champions League, twice in the Women's Super League, once in the final of a Cup competition.
In a Matildas shirt, though, it's been a different story. Thirteen losses and five draws in 26 games since last April, with only two of their eight wins coming against opponents ranked in the top 10.
Kerr, one of the world's greatest strikers, hasn't scored for Australia in over four months. This is alien territory for her and these are alien feelings.
"She hates losing, so she's angry," Gustavsson said afterwards.
"She's so angry. I was almost about to swear again, but she's really, really, really angry and upset after losses. So she needs to [step] aside and you need to read when it's okay to approach her again, because she's a winner.
"But at the same time … it's important that Sam doesn't carry all the burden for this team.
"It's the team that loses out there, not just Sam Kerr."
It's not just Kerr and her team who hate losing in this visceral, almost volcanic way. Increasingly, the Australian public hates it, too.
When the losses first began to mount just over a year ago — with big defeats to Germany and the Netherlands, and smaller ones to Denmark and Japan — they were framed as a kind of necessary pain for future gain: an opportunity to see where Australia sat among some of the world's best nations in order to plan for their arrival on our doorstep in 2023.
It was deliberate, Gustavsson said then, to play games against the hardest possible opponents so we know what to prepare for.
He was setting up the most difficult run of friendly opponents in the program's history, while also trying to short-track young and emerging players into the fold to build squad depth. Believe in the process, he asked.
Then the Tokyo Olympics arrived and we got to see the first test of that early faith.
It was encouraging: a fourth-placed finish, the best ever for an Australian national team at the Games. But the manner of it concerned some: they won just two of the four games they played there — the group stage against New Zealand and the quarter-final against Great Britain — while some old defensive cracks and panicked, long-ball football re-emerged against better sides like the USA and Sweden.
The historic result papered over them, but not for long. A shock loss to Republic of Ireland in September followed — a rather unmemorable occasion to mark Kerr's 100th game.
A month later, back on home soil, they were buoyed by a win and a draw against old foes Brazil, where the Matildas started to show glimpses of the type of football Gustavsson had been wanting them to play.
A friendly series against the USA came next: a loss and a draw against an under-strength world champion. Believe in the process, he asked.
Then came the next test of faith: February's Asian Cup. It started as expected with three convincing wins over Asian minnows Indonesia, Philippines, and Thailand, but their momentum was derailed by a slim 1-0 loss to South Korea in the quarter-final.
It was a tournament Gustavsson and Football Australia said they wanted to win, yet they'd never fallen shorter.
There, too, the same struggles re-emerged: defensive brittleness, dwindling game management, a hit-and-hope mentality when nothing else seems to be working. That was when the wider public's faith in the project began to turn.
Two timely wins against New Zealand in April were a temporary band-aid, but a battering to Euros-bound Spain and Portugal in June — albeit with a Matildas squad lacking most of their senior stars — opened up the same old wounds.
And so came Canada: a two-game series that, in Gustavsson's words, was supposed to be the "line in the sand." With all his biggest names back home, and most of them in good nick, it was meant to be the "bounce back" series like those of Brazil and New Zealand: an opportunity to fill the cup of faith up for a little longer.
Last-minute injuries, though, meant a return to experimentation and adaptation. Gustavsson was as frustrated as anybody, having planned to use the next five windows to "narrow down" his squad and refine the style of football he wanted to see at the World Cup.
And we saw that — to an extent: patches of high-intensity, aggressive, attack-minded play in the first game, an entire half of it in the second.
Questions were answered on stand-out fringe players Cortnee Vine and full-back Charlie Grant, who both showed their qualities against the seventh-ranked nation and should be in the frame for future selection.
And yet, once again, the Matildas ran into themselves: erratic defending, individual errors, a drop-off in intensity and a reversion to panicked long balls as they watched the game slip through their fingers.
Now, with two more losses added to their tally, the incremental improvements no longer appear to be enough to re-fill the public's cup and Gustavsson's recycled mantras have never felt so empty.
"Externally, when you see us losing, maybe there starts to be a lack of faith or lack of hope or lack of belief," he said after the second Canada game on Tuesday.
"I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's a difference between expectations and belief.
"When I took over this team, I believed in it. I said I think this team, in the future, could become one of the best teams in the world.
"We're not there now, we need to be real. We're not the best team in the world right now. But we know, when we play our best, we can beat the best team in the world in a one-off — especially if we have all the players available and we're firing.
"I love that we want to be winners … but we need to have perspective of some of the things that we've done in terms of what we can expect of this team and what we actually believe this team can do."
That is not to say nothing has changed over the past 18 months: Gustavsson has overseen the emergence of Grant, Mary Fowler, Kyra Cooney-Cross, Courtney Nevin, Clare Wheeler and Teagan Micah, as well as the return of Katrina Gorry, who have all subsequently cemented their spots in current and future teams.
But as the football community braces itself for the biggest women's sports tournament in history, of which this fluctuating team will be the centrepiece, public belief in Gustavsson's approach to the Matildas has reached perhaps its lowest ebb.
With time ticking away, the Swede has dwindling opportunities to restore the faith that, 10 months from now, Sam Kerr will not be standing out on that Sydney pitch alone, watching the emptying stands as the biggest games of all pass them by.
