FOLLOWING OUR SAD and sudden exit from the 2011 Women’s World Cup, the focus of attention in the media soon shifted from England’s persistent problems with penalty shoot-outs in international tournaments to some comments made after our spot-kick defeat by our esteemed coach, Hope Powell.
Two days after we had been knocked out in Leverkusen, Hope was quoted in some of our national newspapers referring to the lack of volunteers to take penalties in the shoot-out against France as ‘cowardice’. She had not used that word to us in the changing room.
This prompted a lot of further comment in the media and a fair amount of upset in the camp at the time. Hope later said that her remarks had been blown out of all proportion.
Hope has now been in charge of the England women’s team for fourteen successive seasons, deservedly so. Our performance in Germany, however disappointing it felt to us all at the time, put us sixth in FIFA’s women’s world rankings, behind the USA, Germany, Brazil, Japan and Sweden – the highest position we have ever held. That is one indication of what she has done for women’s football in this country.
Two months after the end of the World Cup, at the first match of England’s Euro 2013 qualifying campaign against Serbia in Belgrade, Hope set a new Football Association record, passing Sir Walter Winterbottom’s run of 139 matches in charge of the England men’s team (1946 to 1962). His record had stood for almost fifty years. Hope’s tally, at the time of publication, is 150. She is also, of course, coach of Great Britain’s women’s team at the 2012 London Olympics.
Hope played sixty-six times for England and scored thirty-five goals as a player. She was in the side that lost to Sweden on penalties in the European Championship final in 1984 and she played in the 1995 World Cup finals. She was also in the team when I made my international debut at Roker Park, in Sunderland, later that year.
She was appointed as England’s first full-time women’s coach in the summer of 1998. She was the first woman to obtain UEFA’s Pro Licence, the highest coaching qualification available in the game. And she now oversees the entire women’s football set-up at the FA from Under-15 level. Looking after Great Britain’s first ever appearance in the women’s football tournament at the Olympic Games has become just another of her growing list of responsibilities within our growing game.
During her time as national coach, she has led England to two World Cups and three European Championships. Hopefully that number will soon rise to four with our qualification for the Euro 2013 finals in Sweden.
Her impact on all levels of the women’s game in our country has been massive. And, as I have previously stated, her impact on me personally has been massive too. I reckon she’s 99 per cent of the reason why I was able to do what I have done in the game.
When I first started playing, England just had a senior women’s team. So the fact that I was sixteen years old and playing well for Wembley Ladies meant I was put straight into the full national squad. That was achievable in the 1990s, because women’s football wasn’t as advanced as it is now. Our world ranking was a lot lower than it is now too. For a sixteen-year-old player to make that jump to full international level today – well, it just would not happen. Unless, of course, the player in question was absolutely phenomenal a female version of Wayne Rooney, for instance. But I don’t ever see that happening in the women’s game because the players are now so much stronger mentally and physically; faster, fitter, more tactically aware.
The great thing about Hope having responsibilities at Under-15, Under-17, Under-19 and Under-23 levels plus the senior side is that players can now progress through the ranks. Each team plays the same formation as the senior team, which makes for really good strength in depth. I think that is brilliant because Hope knows the way she likes to work and she wants us all to play in that way. So she uses the 4–3-3 formation at all levels. All players coming through the system learn how to play like the senior team. This is her coaching philosophy, and it makes the transition from player to player and from team to team so much easier within the national set-up. Every time somebody steps up into a new age group, they know what is required of them. Once they get to the stage where they are close to making the senior side, the move up is simple because they have been playing that way for five or six years.
There have been dozens of examples of that during the last decade or so. But I never had that. It was like ‘Bang, you’re in the squad!’ for me, and then ‘Bang, you’re in the team!’ There’s no comparison to what it was like when I was starting out.
Without a doubt, I do not believe that women’s football could have progressed in our country in the way it has since those days without Hope at the helm. She is the reason why we have reached the quarter-finals of the last two World Cups and the final of the last European Championship, as well as rising to sixth in the world rankings. It is all down to Hope, to her hard work and her dedication to the task.
She started off in the England job with not a lot of experience. She was thrown into what was a new full-time position and she has developed the role according to how she sees the game and what needs to be done for us to fulfil her vision. She brought in Dawn Scott, our exercise scientist, who has played a crucial role in the development of our fitness. I think it wasn’t really until the long build-up to Euro 2005 that all the players started getting on board properly and training every day as a professional would. They were working, they had a day job, but they still had to train. A programme was devised to help them do that – by themselves if need be. As a team, we had to work around the situation we found ourselves in. That was one of the frustrations I experienced when I returned home from playing professionally in the USA. Those days are in the past now.
Tactically, Hope has worked a lot with us defensively for a number of years now, because her vision was always that if we were not conceding goals, then we weren’t losing games. It’s a simple philosophy, really. I think that as a result we are now a very difficult side to beat. We didn’t used to be, perhaps, but we definitely are now.
Getting to where we have got defensively was quite a long road and it was a bit boring at times for me, to be honest. I used to question it from time to time. ‘Why are we doing this?’ I would think to myself. But it has paid off. Our team shape is now right. We are now in motion, reaching levels we would never have got close to without Hope. We were some way off a top six world ranking before we had her, that’s for sure. We were nowhere near that level.
Since Hope became the England women’s coach, we have almost always played in a 4–3-3 formation with a back four, three in midfield – including one holding player and one attacking player, who sits at the tip of a triangle – and a front line of two wingers and a centre-forward. The three forwards all know that they also have a responsibility to defend. We all have a responsibility to defend. She has had to put a lot of hard work in over the years to get us all to play in that system, understand the reasons for that system and make us defensively sound enough to allow us to play in that system too, to use it to its full potential.
Very rarely have we changed from that formation over the years. In fact, I can’t even count on one hand the number of occasions when we have done so. Even then it would have been due to us having a player sent off or something. It has always been 4–3–3 with Hope. That’s the way she likes it.
With a holding midfielder, we are always protecting the back line. I have a free role to play when we are going forward. But it has always been drilled into me that I must do the right thing defensively. Matches at international tournaments are often decided by such small margins. If you make one mistake at international level, you can get punished for it and you find yourself letting the whole team down – letting the whole country down, really.
At club level it can be different, or at least it used to be when I was playing for Arsenal Ladies in our pomp. But we were so good we could get away with making the odd mistake here and there, though we seldom did. England have never been where Arsenal were in those days, of course. So we had to learn, concentrate and focus at all times, particularly at the back. This could be a bit of a drag for me as a result – an attacking player being asked to work on defending. All I wanted to do was get the ball forward, create goals, score goals and win games.
But I understood where Hope was coming from. She was making us as solid as possible at the back so that we could keep leads and win games. She knew that we had the flair players, the quality players, like Yanks and me. We were left to devise our own attacking options when we had the ball going forward. What we didn’t have, as a team, was the ability to shut teams out. We have that now – from one to eleven.
Hope instilled in us the mantra that defence leads to attack. Once we get our shape right at the back and place people in certain positions to deal with certain situations, making sure that every angle and every gap is covered, we can think about going forward and attacking teams. It took a long time for us to take that on board. But gradually we did. We started losing fewer matches and winning more of them.
Defending remains Hope’s main focus with us today: stopping other teams playing, winning the ball for ourselves, making space, and then going on the attack to score goals.
But, make no mistake, this has been the best, most consistent generation of women’s footballers England has ever had. There are currently about five of us in the England squad with over a hundred international caps. There have been few changes to our line-up for almost a decade now. Hope saw that generation come through the ranks, and that is why so much was made of us reaching our potential in or around 2009.
Of course, some players, such as Katie Chapman, have moved on since, and in April 2012 Faye White announced her retirement from international football, with ninety caps to her name. She recently had keyhole surgery on both knees. She’s due to be a mum for the first time later this year too. So it’s the right decision. But we will miss her. England will miss her.
We are all getting older, of course, and we can’t go on for ever. But the way that the systems are now set up, we don’t need to. Look at the youngsters we unearthed at the 2011 Women’s World Cup in Germany, players like Sophie Bradley and Ellen White. Both of them came straight into the England team on the biggest stage of them all and did a terrific job. I think we are in great hands, going forward.
Hope has introduced a lot of analytical stuff to our regime, both collectively and individually. We never studied the opposition too much until she arrived. Now we do – footage of ourselves as well as other teams. We look at the England team performance, but we also look at our own individual performances. Hope has always been really big on that. She encourages us to be students of the game, sitting, watching and learning about ourselves. I might get asked: ‘When you ran down the wing and crossed the ball, where else could you have put it? Was the final ball good enough?’ We go over things in fine detail, and we improve as players as a result.
We actually grade ourselves. We used to get DVDs sent out to us, now we can view things on a special website. We watch our performances and then we have to put marks down on a spreadsheet with comments – effectively writing our own reports on how we think we did. We then send them back to Phil Worrall, our video analyst at the FA. If we have any questions we can discuss them with other team-mates on this site.
The idea behind this is that Hope can then get an understanding of how we think we have done on the pitch – what we think we are doing right and what we think we are doing wrong. Obviously she has her own opinions, and so do the coaching staff, but the players’ take on things is a valuable perspective to have as well. That is how it works – collectively and individually. We have done a version of this for years. It works well and it pays dividends.
Phil is always on hand to clip things up during the first half of a match too, which is really useful at half-time. Hope may see something that she wants to discuss. We can now do that with video and talk about it properly during the break, with the aim of us going out in the second half and putting it right. The attention to detail is top notch.
Hope is an expert at not tweaking what doesn’t need to be tweaked up front. I am lucky. She has always allowed me to go forward and attack in a way that comes naturally to me. I have my own natural ‘savvy’ to roam around the pitch. I can see chances, I can create chances, and I can take chances too. I am, pretty much, left to myself in the final third of the pitch, which is great. There is little that I am told to do. Of course, Hope may alter it a bit if there is a certain situation on the field and she wants certain players to support the play in whatever way. But, generally, if I am in a one-on-one situation, either on the wing or in the box, then she will always want me to show my skill and to be as creative as I can be, either by getting a shot in on goal or by finding somebody who is in a better position than me.
This works perfectly for me. It’s how I like it. It gives me the freedom to do pretty much what I want to do in the final third. And I prosper in that position. Any attacking player will tell you that they just want to be allowed to play their game.
I would soon be told if I was doing something wrong, though. If I made a bad decision – trying to take on two or three players when there was a team-mate who was ‘open’, for instance – then I would expect her to address that with me. And she would. So there is a responsibility there. But, after so many matches under her, we know each other so well.
In my opinion, structurally, the whole FA set-up regarding women’s football is now very sound. That is down to Hope. Everything that is in place, she has helped to put into place. The big question people keep asking me is, ‘How long will Hope go on for with England?’ I can’t answer that. They’ll have to ask her. But I personally see her staying within the FA for some time to come, making sure that everything is ticking along nicely and going smoothly within the women’s game. At forty-five she is still young for a coach. Sir Alex Ferguson is twenty-five years her senior and he hasn’t quit his job yet. Her experience is now at a quite phenomenal level.
A few years ago, Hope was linked to the vacant manager’s job at Grimsby Town. This was at a time when the club was still in the Football League. I don’t know how serious the interest was, but the fact that she was linked with the club says so much about what she has already achieved in women’s football.
Hope has overseen a massive change in our game in a relatively short space of time. If football is now the number one participated-in female sport in our country, as it has been for some time, she deserves credit for that. As I keep saying, the situation is unrecognizable from the one I found myself in at Watford when I first started to play the game.
With so many more girls playing football, the England players have become role models for them, which is fantastic. They really do look up to us because we play for England. They see us on television, in magazines and in newspapers. They don’t just know our names, they know where we play and how we play. Recognition of this nature makes a big difference. It is now, perhaps, something that they want to achieve for themselves later on in their own lives – and something that they can see is achievable.
When I talk to these young girls or do a question-and-answer session at a school or for a team, they always want to know, ‘How did you get to where you are? How much work did you have to put in? How did you get spotted?’ I get asked the same sort of questions every time, wherever I go. That is what seems to be at the forefront of a lot of these young minds: ‘How can I get to where you are?’
It is great for them to be able to ask these questions and receive some advice. I didn’t have anything like that. I couldn’t ask anybody, because nobody came to see me at my school. I didn’t really know what to do or where to go. I had to struggle through, as we all did at that time. But now I can feed back the information they want to know and therefore help them achieve their goals. We can all help these youngsters develop and find a team to play in. On certain occasions I give them tips on some of the skills I use. All of it helps them, and helps the game in our country. I so longed to have this sort of input as a child, and I think that it’s lovely that the children of today in England have that. That is the way it should be.
When I was growing up, my role model was male, Ian Wright. That’s all I had. But today, a nine- or ten-year-old can watch women’s football on the television – in a World Cup or whatever – and see us play in front of thousands of people. This inspires them, maybe to one day be like a Kelly Smith, a Karen Carney, an Alex Scott, a Faye White, an Ellen White or whoever. If a young female football fan can watch people like us playing football with the Three Lions on our shirts, they will inevitably look up to us. That is why television plays such a big role in the continued growth of the game. And that is why it’s so important for England to do well.
Young girls can now reach out and touch the potential if they have the ambition, the drive and the right attributes. They can all strive for a higher standard. You can’t put a price on that. If you don’t see that, you don’t really know about it. We are in a good place right now.
On a personal note, I want to say that the biggest thing Hope has ever done for me is being there for me. She cares about me more as a person than as a footballer. She said that to me at my lowest point. She also made me realize that she wouldn’t leave me to struggle through my problems on my own. She wanted me to be healthy again. To get my mind right. To get my life right. She saw that as my priority. She didn’t just care about the player in her team. Far from it. She cared more about me as a person than about my footballing ability, which is what I really appreciated at that time. Looking back, it was absolutely necessary for me.
There are so many people out there who just want to speak to you because of who you are or because of your status in the game or whatever. When that goes, so do they. Hope was never like that with me. At my lowest point, she was my strongest support.
Our friendship is now a very strong one. She just says it how it is and I give my opinions too. We respect each other so much due to the trust we have built up over the years. We are honest with each other and we can tell each other anything. That is a nice thing to have with someone, even more so when you’re a footballer and that person is your national team coach.
That whole dark episode in my life is the main reason why the two of us get along so well today. I really appreciate having Hope in my life. She got me through. She didn’t have to do that. She could have left me with my problems. She could have left me with my drinking. She didn’t have to pick me up. But she saw that I had a serious problem and she was there for me. She told me what she was going to do to try and help me. She wanted me to know that she cared for me and that she was there. She respected me enough to remain in my life. I didn’t make it easy for her – and that is an understatement. But she stayed strong for me throughout it all.
In fact I was a pain in the arse at times, I know that. I wasn’t a very nice person to be around when I was drunk. Hope saw me in that situation with her own eyes. It was far from ideal, but maybe that is what had to happen. She knew that wasn’t the proper me. She knew me well enough to appreciate that.
I had demons, and I didn’t know how to cope with them. Hope knew that by getting me the right help I could start to beat them. That is why I have said she is 99 per cent responsible for where I am today. Without her, my story would have been very different. At the very least, I don’t think I would have played football any more.
Hope told me that she would always be there to catch me if I fell. As a player, going through what I was going through at the time, those words meant the world to me. That is why she remains a true friend in my life and will always be so. What she has done for me means so much to me. Another approach from another person could easily have meant another ending. An ending I don’t even want to think about.