ENGLAND COACH HOPE Powell had always instilled in us that 2009 would be our year to blossom. She had nurtured the team for several years by now and the Women’s Euro, to be held in Finland in August and September of that year, was our best bet yet to do something special on the international stage.
Bizarrely, our qualification programme had actually begun a few months before the 2007 Women’s World Cup in China. We played Northern Ireland at Gillingham and beat them 4–0. I scored one of the goals in that one, although the scoreline was not as comfortable as it suggests. The match was goalless at half-time.
We didn’t play again until later in the year, at the end of October. But the qualifying group was well under way by then, with the other teams – Belarus, the Czech Republic and Spain plus Northern Ireland – all having played two or three matches.
Belarus were seen as the weakest team in the group, but they then went and walloped Northern Ireland 5–0 at home, beating our scoreline against them. However, they were well beaten by both the Czech Republic and Spain before they travelled over to meet us in Walsall. It was another resounding 4–0 win for us. Again, I got one of the goals.
By the end of the year it was clear that the Czech Republic and Spain were going to be our rivals for an automatic qualification place. They both had 100 per cent records until they met in Pilsen, where the outcome was a 2–2 draw. But we were ranked well above both of them. We were playing well and we were confident.
However, we struggled against both of them. Spain held us for over an hour at Shrewsbury, in front of a decent crowd of 8,753, before Karen Carney grabbed us a winner. And then, on a freezing cold night at the Keepmoat Stadium in Doncaster, we were held 0–0 by the Czechs.
In March 2008 we recorded a 2–0 victory in Lurgan against Northern Ireland, and we followed that with an impressive 6–1 thrashing of Belarus in Minsk. But both the Czech Republic and Spain did the double over these two countries as well. So, with two games left, we knew that it was going to be the head-to-head matches that would decide the group. This was not what we had expected when the draw had been made.
Things got interesting when Spain thumped the Czechs 4–1 at home in Madrid, leaving us level on points with the Spanish but with a game in hand over them. We next travelled to Prague to take on the Czechs in the hope of making up for that dire draw in Doncaster.
We fell behind to a Katerina Doskova goal. And trailed at half-time. It was the sternest half-time team talk we had received in a long time. It worked as well. We came out in the second half and scored five goals without reply. I got two, Emily Westwood, Kaz Carney and Jill Scott got the others.
This meant that a draw in Zamora, close to the Portuguese border, against Spain would be enough to put us through to the Women’s Euro finals in Finland. A defeat would mean it would go to head-to-head. We had won 1–0 at home so Spain would have to better that result against us.
At half-time we were 2–0 down. Kaz pulled us one back at the start of the second half, and I notched the equalizer fifteen minutes from time. But it had been far too close for comfort. When Spain were thrashed in the play-offs, 4–0, by Holland, it did make me wonder whether we had gone backwards a little. But the main thing about qualification groups is to qualify, and we had managed to do that.
The Euro finals had now been extended to twelve teams, with three groups of four. The top two in each group would go through to the quarter-finals along with the two best third-placed teams.
If our qualification campaign had been a little hairy at times, it was nothing compared to our experiences in Group C in the competition proper. We were drawn against Italy, Russia and Sweden. The scheduling of the matches gave us our hardest game, against Sweden, last. So we had to hope that by then we would have done enough to reach the last eight.
Before the competition got under way, a Swedish football magazine published an interview with one of their players that insinuated that I was a dirty player. The pigtail-pulling incident from our match in Blackburn four years earlier was dragged up again. I was a cheat and all sorts, apparently. It made me laugh that someone had thought to talk about this, never mind write it up. I had to remember what Hope told me about these things: I must ignore them. It was probably published to get a reaction from me. Well, they weren’t going to get one. Not a negative one anyway.
When I saw it, I thought it was a stupid article. Somebody posted it to me on Facebook. It featured a cartoon that showed a caricature of me pulling at this girl’s hair. I had clearly hit a nerve in the Swedish camp by doing that.
Hope caused a surprise by not naming Rachel Yankey in our squad for Finland. Yanks was probably one of our highest-profile players so this generated a bit of publicity in the press. People were asking us if this meant that nobody’s place in the team was safe. We just had to ignore all that and focus on the task in hand.
I was personally a little bit surprised by Rachel’s omission from the squad, just because her name within the game was so big and there is always the matter of what she can do for you on the pitch. At times she had been a match winner for England, so it was a bit of a shock to find out she wasn’t going to be there with us. Then again, Sue Smith was playing really well. We had two top-class players challenging for that position on the left flank.
Hope obviously had her reasons for leaving her out. I don’t know the full story. But, as the papers said, nobody’s place was safe in the team any more. We all knew that we had to keep producing the goods or we might be out of the squad as well. We talked about it privately, of course, among ourselves. It was a big surprise to a lot of the players in the group, and it gave a few a kick up the bum as well. But the fact was, if we were going to reach our potential in 2009 – a prospect that had been bandied around for a little while now – then we were going to have to do it without one of our most influential players of the last decade.
We started off the tournament against Italy in Lahti. I remember that we had a toy mascot, a cuddly moose called ‘Bruce’. He was to attend all our games in Finland. We had had ‘Yolanda the Panda’ in China. This tradition was started by Rachel Pavlou, who is the national women’s football development manager at the FA. Bruce was sat on the top of the perspex roof on our dugout for that match. I was sat underneath him, struggling with a slight knee injury. By the time I got on, at the start of the second half, we were a player down, Casey Stoney having been sent off early in the game for a so-called ‘push’ on Melania Gabbiadini. We felt that it was harsh.
Despite playing with ten, we’d still taken the lead when Fara Williams scored from the penalty spot after Kaz had been brought down by two players. But in the second half, we kind of imploded. Patrizia Panico equalized for them, and then, with eight minutes remaining, Alessia Tuttino scored a wonder strike from way out.
We were speechless after that result. Obviously you don’t want to start any tournament off with a defeat. It made us realize that we had to really buck our ideas up if we were going to progress. Italy were not the best team in our group by any stretch of the imagination. So it was a big shock to the system; we weren’t prepared for anything like that. It was a very bad result for us, whichever way we looked at it. And it meant that it was going to be a hard job for us from now on. We couldn’t afford any more slip-ups.
Things got worse before they got better. In Helsinki, against Russia, the lowest-ranked team in our group and a side that had been beaten 3–0 by Sweden in their opening match, we somehow found ourselves two goals down after just twenty-two minutes. Ksenia Tsybutovich and Olesya Kurochkina were the Russian goalscorers – names we won’t forget.
I started this match – Jill Scott dropped to the bench; Lindsay Johnson came in for Anita Asante and Rachel Unitt replaced Casey, who was suspended. So we looked quite different at the back from the opening match. We got ourselves into a real big hole in that game. But it turned out to be the making of us.
As the scoreline suggests, we were atrocious in the early part of that game. We just weren’t at the races. There was no other way to look at it: we were going out of the tournament. At that point in the match it did enter my mind that if we didn’t do something spectacular, we were going home. It was as simple as that. Actually, if we continued playing like that, we deserved to go home. Nobody in our side was doing the basics right. We were playing – every one of us – as if we had never played the game before. It was awful.
I don’t know if that was nerves on our part or the effect of too much expectation placed on us to put on a show after the Italy result, against what was felt to be inferior opposition. I couldn’t say to this day. We all knew that we had to win the game, so it is inexplicable, really, and indefensible.
For some reason, we just didn’t play our normal game in the early part of that match. We were very anxious on the ball. And with those two goals going in so early on – we had conceded the first one after just two minutes – I think we were shell-shocked for a little while.
But when I looked around the pitch, into some of our players’ eyes, I just knew that we were so much better than what we were showing out there. At that moment, something happened to us. Something clicked inside us and we bucked our ideas up. We started playing with little touches. We started moving the ball around quicker. We started to believe in ourselves and each other more. Once we started to do that, our confidence grew. And you could literally feel it coming back. I don’t think I ever quite allowed myself to believe that we were going to lose that game, even at 2–0 down, but, obviously, we had it all to do.
To come from two goals down in any match, let alone in the finals of an international tournament, is a very big ask. A massive ask, in fact. Never mind the opposition. We went in at half-time 3–2 up.
Kaz had pulled one back a few minutes after Russia’s second goal, and she then played in Eniola Aluko for the equalizer for us just after the half-hour mark. With a few minutes remaining before the half-time whistle, I’d rocketed one in from near to the centre circle to put us in the lead. The goalkeeper had kicked the ball straight at me. I had one touch and then lobbed it back, over her head and into the net. It was a sweet goal to score – a bit of quick thinking, a bit of skill, and a neat execution. The timing of it could not have been any better either.
We came in at half-time and Hope told us that we were very lucky to be where we were because at 2–0 down we were going out of the tournament. She reiterated that to us. But she was positive. She told us that we had now pulled it around and that we had to go out there in the second half and keep it that way – that we had to keep that belief in ourselves.
Incredibly, after such a mad first half, there were no more goals in the second half. So we had pulled it out of the fire. Two games gone, and we were won one, lost one. We were still very much in the tournament, with the Swedes up next.
Our confidence was back. We had done a lot of work on the mental aspect of our game, and I think that tie with Russia was really the first big test for us in that respect, definitely in tournament football. Having so much more experience and so much more knowledge had enabled us to cope with something like that much better. We were able to stop, think and analyse the game, and then go again. That period was such an important stage in our growth as a team. If we hadn’t had that, I don’t think we would have been able to pull out a result like that. We showed such great character, determination and fight to turn that match around and save our tournament. I believe that the England team from the previous Women’s European Championship, four years earlier, would have struggled to do that.
We always seemed to like to do things the hard way rather than the easy way, for some reason. Why couldn’t we have gone 2–0 up in twenty-two minutes? We didn’t do things that way. We didn’t do comfortable and cruising. No, it was much more like us to go a couple of goals down and then have to produce a miracle to win the game.
Luckily, we now had the players who could do that, with the experience to do that. There is no greater pressure in an international tournament than knowing that you have to do something otherwise you are going home. That match made us realize that we could do that when we had to. When the chips were down, as a team we now knew that we could produce something special. You couldn’t buy the extra belief and confidence that gave us.
Due to the complexities involved with eight teams going through to the quarter-finals from a group stage involving twelve teams, mathematically it was actually easier to go through than go out. After the Russia game we were in third place with a win, but the group had been so unpredictable that there was nothing to suggest the Russians could not go out and beat Italy in their final game. So we knew we needed to get a result in Turku against Sweden, who were already through with comfortable wins over both Russia and Italy.
We wanted to do that for many reasons anyway. We hadn’t played them since the last Women’s Euro, and all of us who’d played in that game in Blackburn remembered that day only too well. I am pretty sure that the Swedish girl with the pigtails could remember it as well!
Casey came back into the team after her one-match suspension, and Unitt moved to the bench. Otherwise it was the same team that had started against Russia. Sweden had some players in their team who had played in Blackburn, but not as many as we did. I am pretty sure that that match meant much more to us than it did to them.
We felt confident going into the match. We had now started to believe, as a team, that we could match the top nations in the world. There wasn’t the same fear factor when coming up against the likes of Sweden that there had been in the past for us. I recall us going into this particular game and genuinely believing that we could beat them.
Faye White put in another awesome performance for us in this one. She was Player of the Match again, as she often was in the big games that mattered. She also gave us the lead, in the twenty-eighth minute, when she towered over Charlotte Rohlin to score with a great header past Hedvig Lindahl.
We held the lead for twelve minutes, until Katie Chapman was adjudged to have fouled Lotta Schelin in the box and Victoria Sandell Svensson scored from the penalty spot. We thought the penalty decision was harsh. Sir Trevor Brooking, the head of development at the Football Association, was sat in the stands, and he agreed.
Our defence was rock solid in this match and overall I think we were the better team, but we ended up with a 1–1 draw. A good result, really. We also felt that we had played our best game of the tournament, by far, against the best team we had faced, so far. And without the penalty, we would probably have beaten them.
Italy defeated Russia 2–0 in the other match in Group C, so we finished in third place on four points, with a win, a draw and a defeat, behind Sweden and Italy. We had improved with every game and we were feeling confident going into the knockout stages after an admittedly very shaky start.
In fact it began to feel to me as though we were on the verge of being able to make a breakthrough at the top level of women’s international football. I had never felt quite like that before. Over quite a few years now we had built up such a strong base and togetherness in the England camp. Previously when we had played the likes of Sweden, Germany and the USA, it was a case of damage limitation against them. Now we were feeling down as a team because we hadn’t won a game against one of them, which we’d really deserved to do. The goalless draw against Germany in the 2007 Women’s World Cup had been a watershed for us; the longer Euro 2009 went on, the more I felt that we were reaching another level. And that felt absolutely fantastic. I had moved from playing in an England team that seemed to lose all the time to the best teams in the world to playing in an England team that was able to compete and was unlucky not to beat one of the best teams in the world.
We had some very good players in that squad, with the right level of age and experience. The fact that we had been together for quite a while was a big plus point. Mentally, physically and technically we were so much better than before. There was also the fact that many of us were now playing professionally in America. I believe that made us a much stronger team going into that tournament, fitter and more skilful in key areas. The core of our team was now playing at an elite level. That meant training on the ball every day. That was so important for us going into that tournament.
Having said that, those of us who were playing in the States were just coming off the back of a hard six-month summer season, so there was a bit of tiredness in there too. Kaz seemed to be living on jelly sweets in Finland due to this. I remember that she had to be given these Lucozade gum boosters all the time to help her fight fatigue. I think she was just wiped out after a full-on league campaign; she needed a sugar high and some extra energy when she went out and played for us.
I began to feel that way too. I felt absolutely drained at times. I felt that I was trying to give everything but I also felt like I didn’t have anything more to give. There was no more fuel in the tank. This is a horrible feeling at the best of times, but when you are playing in a major tournament for your country it’s even worse. Given that I genuinely felt this was our time and our chance, it was hard to comprehend and to deal with that at times.
Luckily, there were a number of key players in our team who had been well rested over the summer. They were probably in a much better physical condition than those of us who had been playing in the Women’s Professional Soccer league over the pond for the last few months. So it was swings and roundabouts, really. The WPS had definitely improved those of us who had gone out there in a lot of ways, but it had also wiped us out a bit, and a few of us struggled.
Despite all that, this was the best England team I had ever played in. That was due to a combination of factors, but the main one, for me, was the coach. I will talk more about Hope a little later. I want to devote a whole chapter to her because she is 99 per cent of the reason why I am here today, why I have been able to do what I have done in my career. The improvements that have been made in the England team over the years all come down to the hard work Hope and her staff have put in since she has been in charge, getting us to understand the system that we play, making us defensively sound, and making us fitter. Without doubt she is the reason we are where we are now. And we started to show real evidence of that during those three weeks in Finland in August and September 2009.
By the time of the quarter-finals, Finland was going football crazy. They are a small nation but they came out firing in the tournament and the crowds turned out to support them. In the group stages, the Finns were consistently watched by crowds of more than 16,000. Compare that figure with the lowly 1,462 that saw us play Russia.
Finland had played all their group matches in the Olympic Stadium in Helsinki, which hosted the 1952 Olympic Games, where Czechoslovakian Emil Zatopek was the star of the show, winning gold in the 5,000 metres, 10,000 metres and the marathon, and the famous Hungary team featuring Ferenc Puskas, Sandor Kocsis and Nandor Hidegkuti first came to international prominence when they won the gold medal in the men’s football tournament. More recently, it had hosted the 1983 and 2005 Athletics World Championships. In such a setting and with such support, Finland had won their opening two matches, beating Denmark 1–0 and Holland 2–1. But our quarter-final with them would be held in Turku, not Helsinki, and we hoped that this would help us. We stayed put for a few days as we didn’t need to travel.
It surprised me that Finland didn’t stay in Helsinki. But the draw didn’t work like that. They had won Group A, so it seemed odd that they had to sacrifice that advantage and head over to Turku and the smallest stadium of the lot – the Veritas Stadion, with a 9,000 capacity – to play against us.
We knew all about the Finns, of course, from that magnificent match at the City of Manchester Stadium during Euro 2005. Striker Laura Kalmari was still the star of the team. She was their main goalscorer. But they had a number of capable players in their side. They had reached the semi-finals four years ago, of course, and they were a better team now than they had been back then.
Due to an injury to Alex Scott, Lindsay moved over to right-back for us in this match and Anita came back into the team to partner Faye at the centre of defence. Otherwise we were unchanged.
The midfield pairing of Fara and Katie was now so strong when they played together, allowing me to do what I enjoyed doing best – roaming around the pitch with the ball at my feet and making penetrating runs.
Eniola was flanked superbly up front by Karen and Sue, who had certainly proved that the decision to play her was the right one. We had gelled so well as a team that when one of us had to drop out, somebody could come in and take their place and do the job for them. We were a strong unit now.
What we needed was an early goal to silence the crowd. And what we got was an early goal to silence the crowd. We put together a really slick move; I helped on Katie’s pass, and Eni was on hand to finish it off. There were fourteen minutes on the clock.
Fara popped up to stab home a second, and the crowd now fell very quiet. But then a horrible injury to Faye, after a clash of heads, rocked us. For the second international tournament in a row we had lost our captain and leader with a fractured cheekbone. Jill Scott came on for Faye, and Katie dropped back to join Anita in central defence. We got to half-time with the two-goal lead intact but we were in a fair bit of disarray.
The Finns became even more physical in the second half – and that’s saying something. They were a strong team and, as sometimes happens in football, accidental and unfortunate incidents such as what had happened to us can change the mindsets of both sides. Sensing this, the crowd became more raucous and more vocal, despite the electronic scoreboard still showing 2–0 to us.
We survived a hell of a lot of pressure in the first part of the second half. I seemed to be spending much more time putting tackles in and dropping back to help the team out than surging forward and trying to create attacks for us.
I could not remember us being put under such consistent and intense pressure from corners in a match before. The height of the Finnish strikers was causing us huge problems in terms of keeping out headers and shots from knockdowns.
Finland brought on another big striker in Annica Sjölund, for Essi Sainio. The pressure mounted. Within a few minutes, Sjölund’s height had got them back into it. The goal, un-surprisingly, came from a corner. The noise that greeted it was extremely loud.
What happened after that was one of those moments in football that you want to play over and over again on your DVD player or video recorder, or on YouTube. Straight from our kick-off, Eni picked up the ball and ran at the Finns at pace. She was dribbling, jinking, twisting and turning, and left three or four defenders in her wake. As she entered the penalty box, she looked up and drilled the ball past Tinja-Riikka Korpela in the Finnish goal to restore our two-goal lead – after about ten seconds!
We all went mad. What a goal! What a time to score it! We all ran over to her to celebrate, jumping up and down. Everybody was off the bench doing the same. The match had been turned round, back in our favour.
But the Finnish onslaught just dusted itself down and started all over again. They were forcing corner after corner after corner, realizing that this was their best option. And it was. Linda Sällström scored for them from another corner on seventy-eight minutes to make it 3–2.
The remaining twelve minutes saw such a display of fighting spirit and strong defensive play on our part that it seemed to last for an hour or more. Those of us who were aching with tiredness probably felt it the most, but the adrenalin kicked in and got us all over the line. Rachel Brown made a great save in the closing minutes from Kalmari to seal our win.
We’d held out. It was a magnificent performance. Finland were a tough team to beat, particularly on their own patch. We were elated at the end.
The crowd was so partisan. We had a little section of family and friends, but that was it. The rest of the crowd was Finnish through and through. Any time they went forward, you would hear this noise. I wouldn’t say it was hostile, but it was definitely very loud. Every time they won a corner – and they won a lot of corners – they put four or five of their biggest players around our goalkeeper. They tried to hit the near post with every one and then tried to bundle the ball in. The noise of the crowd got louder with every corner. They really got behind them. It began to affect us a little. Every time they got a corner, the nerves rose in your body. We just knew what it meant, where the ball was going to go and everything. And, of course, if it dropped for them in the right way, there was a good chance they were going to score.
It was another massive game for us in terms of our development. For us, being able to win in a cauldron like that against opposition playing like that was another big step on the learning ladder. Again, we couldn’t have done that a few years earlier, I am certain of that. Grinding out a result like that with a performance like that in an environment like that to reach the semi-finals of a major international tournament for the very first time was phenomenal.