What do you do when you win the UEFA Euros after representing England for 12 long years? I dance on a press conference table, apparently. That’s the moment I’ve been asked about most since we won on Sunday, and frankly, I can’t believe I did it. All I remember is everyone celebrating, someone shouting to me ‘We’re going into the press conference!’ and in the whirlwind I just saw Sarina Wiegman and made a beeline for her. I got on the table, looked up and saw a sea of iPhones pointed at me. ‘Oh God,’ I remember thinking. ‘You have to stick to this now, you’ve committed.’ But you see me say to Sarina, ‘OK we’re done now, bye!’ and run out the room, I was so embarrassed!
Truthfully, those few days after the match are one big happy blur. The win felt like the crescendo of my life. When you work towards something for so long and achieve the goal you set, it’s overwhelming. There wasn’t one point in the game I switched off; even after Chloe Kelly scored in the 110th minute, it didn’t feel done. But when that final whistle went? You can see by how much I’m crying how relieved I am - that’s another thing I learned from the game, I really don’t have the most picturesque crying face!
Football has always come naturally to me. I grew up playing with my dad and brother in the back garden. I’m from Nottingham and there weren’t any girls' teams around at the time, so I used to have to go down to my brother's training sessions. Once I aged out of mixed teams, I couldn’t play anymore. But a couple of years later, my friend's dad set up a local team called West Bridgford Colts and from there, my love for the game only grew. Before long I was travelling to play for Leicester City, then Nottingham Forest and when I was 18, Doncaster Rovers Belles signed me for what was then the inaugural season of the Women’s Super League.
Growing up as a girl playing football, the sexist comments take an emotional toll.
But growing up as a girl playing football, it takes an emotional toll. You’re going through puberty, exploring your femininity and who you are, while at the same time people are telling you football is ‘too masculine’ for girls - and your sports clothes don’t fit in with everyone else. It’s so easy at that age to be influenced by your peers, dropping out of the game you once loved. That’s why I’m so passionate about getting girls better access to football during P.E. at school – they shouldn’t have to travel for 40 miles like I did, doing homework in the car and making countless sacrifices, just to play the game.
That lack of access is a lot to do with why I never actually considered playing football professionally until I was around 22. It just wasn’t very visible to me growing up, so I believed I’d have to give up at some point. That might seem sad, but it’s also what ensured I studied business at university and got a back-up career in place - a necessity for women in football since we’re certainly not set up for life financially.
Men’s football is incredibly big business: boys can be signed from the age of five and grow up attached to a major professional club. But it’s so competitive, few make it to professional level and they’ve typically sacrificed their studies in pursuit of it. So I think we can find a common ground in our polar opposite experiences - while we absolutely need to raise the opportunities for girls to build a career in football earlier, we also need to ensure both boys and girls maintain a dose of reality and plan a life outside football too.
For me, the major hope is that all the talking about women's football right now results in real change for girls' access. Georgia Stanway said it best: 'We’ve been talking about women’s football growing for so long, now we’re talking about how big it is.' This moment really does feel the start of something huge.