The prolific striker has had bad luck with injuries but fully fit at this World Cup, she has the experience to take her country farEight years ago I was playing in the World Cup third-place playoff when we won a penalty in extra time and a Germany player was trying to unsettle the taker, Fara Williams. I felt it necessary to get in the way to protect my teammate by pushing my opponent – only to realise it was Alexandra Popp and that I might have made an error of judgment. The next minute, Eni Aluko had to join me to give us a chance of keeping Popp at arm’s length because it was the type of situation that needed...
The prolific striker has had bad luck with injuries but fully fit at this World Cup, she has the experience to take her country farEight years ago I was playing in the World Cup third-place playoff when we won a penalty in extra time and a Germany player was trying to unsettle the taker, Fara Williams. I felt it necessary to get in the way to protect my teammate by pushing my opponent – only to realise it was Alexandra Popp and that I might have made an error of judgment. The next minute, Eni Aluko had to join me to give us a chance of keeping Popp at arm’s length because it was the type of situation that needed...
This moment of great magnitude will never be forgotten with England’s players providing a glorious explosion of elationChloe Kelly could have run all the way to Hanwell if they would have let her. The place she was brought up alongside her seven siblings, crashing into each other in west London’s concrete cages, is only five miles from here but it would not have mattered if it was 500 the way she felt; the way all of them did. God, the noise. The explosion, the release, the everything. She had only gone and bloody done it. England had. She had scored the goal, the goal. The one they had been waiting for and for so long.England are European champions. Yes, England....
Injury shortly before kick-off denied the tournament’s best finisher the ending she had craved for an entire career While England danced along to “Don’t stop me now”, Alexandra Popp made a long and lonely walk along the touchline to the pocket of Germany fans in Wembley’s north-west corner. She had been stopped before she had even begun. Two or three of the travelling support were able to catch the pieces of kit she tossed up: a water bottle, a bag, perhaps a spare shirt.Popp lobbed up several gifts although, true to form, there was not a towel in sight. She has never thrown that in and it is why, even in an arena pulsating with the glory of one of...
Late Germany goal stings England but no one experiencing this record attendance can doubt the Lionesses’ support keeps marching forwardSomething strange happened as England’s players trudged off the Wembley pitch after their worrying Women’s World Cup hangover continued with a late kick in the teeth. The crowd rose up to cheer. Pretty much all 77,768 of them – the biggest home attendance for the national team.A 2-1 defeat to Germany was not what the supporters – or England’s manager, Phil Neville – had come for. But this match, the Lionesses first at Wembley since 2014, was as much about winning hearts and minds. And even on an icebox of a day, in which the damp seeped into every bone and...