UK Edition
England goalkeeper Mary Earps says ahead of SheBelieves Cup: 'Winning the World Cup is all we are aiming for'
Few 15-year-olds can claim to have played football with a European Cup winner and fewer still can say they are on such familiar terms with said player that they suddenly realise they “don’t actually know his real name” because they have spent so long addressing him via a nickname.
This is the panic gripping Mary Earps, the England and Wolfsburg goalkeeper who grew up five minutes from the Nottingham football grounds by the Trent, as she nurses her tea at a cafe in the city. “His daughter is called Jenny,” she offers. Jenny the cricketer? Is it Bryn Gunn, of Nottingham Forest? “That’s his name. I bumped into him walking his dog the other day.”
From the age of 14 Earps was a staple of her father’s five-a-side team and the pair’s Wednesday ritual saw them play alongside a cast of ex-County, Forest and Mansfield Town players and sharing drinks afterwards: them on beer, Earps sipping cola with her feet dangling from the bar stool. For Earps, by then a goalkeeper at Leicester, the sessions were a rare chance to “get on the ball and move it quickly”, and “gave me a different dimension to my training. They’d just stay at centre-half dictating the play. They didn’t have to move. That was another lesson: you don’t have to be the loudest, the fastest. You can just be the player you are.”
When England head coach Phil Neville explained he “looks at keepers as outfield players” he could not have imagined circumstances that meant one of his had trained in that vein all her life. “He gets us involved in possession practices,” Earps says of Neville. “If we’re doing rondos, possession drills, we’re just like outfielders.”
Four months before England’s World Cup opener against Scotland, Earps will play in the SheBelieves Cup, a four-team tournament in the United States involving Brazil, Japan and the hosts. It will be the clearest barometer yet of England’s progress under Neville and the readiness of a squad who, Earps admits, spent many months “just hanging in a really difficult space” (more on that later) after Mark Sampson’s sacking.
Earps wears lightly the intellect that earned a business degree from Loughborough, where Sir Alex Ferguson was a regular case study in lectures that spring to mind when she spots parallels between Neville and his former Manchester United boss. Neville sends her Christmas and birthday cards. “He doesn’t want you to feel on edge. You should never want to be restricting yourself, constantly thinking, ‘Can I do this? Can I do that?’ But he has standards.”
Last season, Earps was, statistically, the best keeper in England, keeping eight clean sheets at Reading. She knew Wolfsburg were tracking her and when their interest intensified she consulted with her England room-mate, Barcelona’s Toni Duggan. She had, in reality, made the decision years earlier, playing for Bristol against Frankfurt in a Champions League quarter-final.
“They had 34 shots on target across both legs,” Earps recalls. “They were gunning for blood. That was the moment [when I said to myself], ‘I’m going to play in Germany one day. This is what I want.’ We walked in and there were just lines of BMWs where the players had driven in. It was just a different level.”
So high are Wolfsburg’s standards that the team once fined a player who was late for a meeting because she was stuck in an elevator. “There’s no, ‘You’re new. Don’t worry about it.’ You have to grow up fast.”
The hefty fine system aside, Earps considers the decision to move to Germany as “one of the best things I have done in my entire life”. Her only discomfort is the guilt she feels at being unable to speak fluent German, purely because she finds it “ rude and I feel like a pest”. But upon arrival her team-mates implored her to “be normal, because you’ve been brought here for a reason”.
She gives instructions in German now, but the squad had to decide what words they both understood. “I can say tuck in, and English people would know what that was. They were like, ‘Tuck in the bedcovers?’”
The team had Christmas dinner at Pernille Harder’s house, where they all brought things that were “symbolic of our national Christmas dinners”. Earps captioned the Instagram photo #PreBrexit. “Any time they bring up Brexit, I just deflect. They think it’s ridiculous. It doesn’t seem like a lot’s happened since I’ve left, to be honest.”
The Lionesses, at least, have some stability, after a period in which Sampson was sacked over safeguarding concerns and the FA summoned to parliament to explain their handling of Eni Aluko’s allegations that he had made racist remarks towards her.
Earps chooses her words carefully but is happy to speak. Her most memorable spell under Sampson came at the Euros in 2017, where “it felt like we were going to win it the entire time. That was probably the best togetherness I’ve ever experienced in my entire career.
And then it felt like … Not like that was completely lost, but that we were in a very difficult place. I think part of that was all the media stuff around it. Nobody knew what to do, what to say. It’s always different being in it than what’s being reported. Not that there was a big conspiracy, but the way we felt and the way it was handled – there was a lot of sadness and confusion. People didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to make the situation better.
“There were a lot of things going on that we knew very little about, but we wanted it to be sorted in the right way. I think people [players] don’t know the ins and outs of everything that happened, which is fine, because we had new players, old players, whatever. People weren’t privy to everything that was going on.”
Sampson was sacked on Sept 20 2017 and Neville was appointed the following January. “There was a lot of instability,” says Earps. “It was so elongated. It wasn’t just: old manager, new manager. It was a process of about six months where we still had qualification games.
“We had Mo [Marley, the Under-19s manager], and she did a great job, but the atmosphere in the camp wasn’t right because of everything that was going on outside. There was a lot of media attention, and it was negative towards us as a group. People found that really hard to deal with. That period was like hanging in limbo. Even if Mo was going to be the manager, we just needed that clarity to move forward.”
Did Neville ever address any of it? “He probably acknowledged it at the beginning – ‘I know it’s been difficult.’ But he never went and asked. We never lived in that moment with him. He was just: ‘This is what I want to do.’ That was the start of just trying to move forward.”
Neville’s appointment brought several storms of its own – his perceived lack of managerial experience and his infamous sexist tweets – and Earps’ relief that the squad are now “in a new phase” is palpable.
“I don’t think anyone was consciously blocking it out. It was, like, ‘We’ve got a World Cup in 18 months. We don’t have any time for any more of this. Let’s not let this happen again.’ That’s what it turned to pretty quickly and [Neville] is clear about what he wants to achieve.”
Which is? “I’m not saying that anything less than winning the World Cup is unacceptable, but it’s the only thing that we’re aiming for.”